


Diving for pearls in the halls of Helheim

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Family Headcanons, Fantastical war epic: take 2, Scandinavian mythology - Freeform, Someone is a surprise mage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-09-24 21:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9787259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "But I can't stay here!" Emil gestures to the wraith-strewn wastes behind him "Tuuri needs the cure, and I think Sigrun is all alone in the woods with a fever-"Hannu flaps his hands in his face with a dismissive snort "Yes, yes, doom and gloom and everyone's dead. Welcome to Helheim. I don't care about that. All I care about is getting your blond butt out of here before your physical body dies and by extension, my own auburn butt. You think I like it anymore than you do down here?"Emil shrugs helplessly."Well I don't! It's full of ghosts, everything smells like death and I can't even visit my own brother's haven! This is a police state, basically, and the sooner you quit whining the sooner we can over-throw it and return you to your friends, and me and all the other dead folks around here can go back to where we belong. Now let's move! If we leave your body lying soulless for too long Lalli might bury you."





	1. Everything falls apart. And not slowly or gently; it's a mighty implosion of awful

**Author's Note:**

> And once again I try to write an epic sprawling fantasy incorporating mythology (as some of you may have noticed I FRICKING LOVE MYTHOLOGY) and weird headcanons. I have a good feeling about this one. Sorta. Anyway, let's get started on this road-trip into Hel.

When one grows up in Finland and is raised a mage, one principle is hammered in as a matter of importance over all other things: no Finn, by blood or nationality or by vaguest association with Finnish magic, should ever die away from water. There’s something in the make-up of a Finnish mind that makes it incredibly difficult for the mind, persisting outside of the body, to find its way to whatever after-life it might be bound for without a body of water nearby. 

“A lake is fine,” Lalli’s father said “But a river is better, because a river moves. That will encourage the soul to move along as well. The worst thing you can do to a soul is let it expire somewhere near stagnant water. Then the soul will just get foetid and it’ll start to rot the other things around it. We, as a people and a nationality, are too much like water for our own good.”

“Wait,” said Lalli’s brother “Does that mean we turn into bad ghosts if we die and we’re not near water?”

“Not necessarily-”

“How close to water? Do we have to be in it? I wanna die in my bed when I’m old. Do I have to make my grandkids bring my bed out to a river?”

“No, just as long as you’re within walking distance of a river-”

“Is that why Grandma keeps going to the lake? Is she going to die, but then, no, she doesn’t feel like it, so she comes back and makes Lalli’n’me do magic stuff?”

“No, Hannu. You’re not focussing.”

“That’s because you’re bad at explaining stuff.”

Lalli wishes Hannu had just shut up and let their father talk, because he can’t remember much else of the conversation that day beyond Hannu babbling about how mean Grandma was when she got on one of her magic kicks and put them and Onni through their paces. While he does think Hannu was right to criticise their grandmother’s strange training regime, Hannu should have realised his ever-flapping jaw could cause their father to omit an important piece of information and cost his brother his survival some day in the distant future.   
There was a second part to that conversation: something about the other peoples of the world. Norwegians needed to die near mountains, so they could flag down a Valkyrie more easily from a mountain peak (bad luck for Sigrun, in this pancake of a country). People with Islamic backgrounds died in accordance with their nationalities, but their bodies must not be burnt or damaged so they were still usable on the day of Judgement with their god. Lalli has no idea where Danes should die, but he doubts any of the well-spring of trolls that attacked them also survived to pester the Tank. Not the way Sigrun fought. In the coming days Mikkel’s biggest concern will be preserving Reynir and Tuuri’s lives, while his own immunity will protect him from the brunt of the danger. 

Hopefully there is something of that lost lesson pertaining to the Swedes, buried in the back of Lalli’s brain. If he doesn’t find a way to stop the bleeding for good, Emil is going to die, and Lalli would rather not be tormented by his angry ghost as well as the knowledge that he let Emil die in his arms. Wouldn’t be the first time Lalli has watched a life trickle away, helpless to stop up the wounds, or to comfort the dying.  
He can’t go through that again. The first time, with Ville, that almost destroyed him. It wasn’t so bad for Onni and Tuuri because they could talk about it and about him, but Ville’s death entered Lalli as a thick flow of mud and stoppered his mouth shut for half a year. For six full months, every time he tried to talk there was mud in his mouth to catch the words, make a bog of his mouth and send them back down his throat in a useless slurry. And that was in Keuruu where he was safe. Where Onni was within arm’s reach and he could be sure of a safe place to sleep every night. Where Tuuri was healthy and happy as she could make herself. 

If Lalli loses another in these wilds, he will undoubtedly die. Here, there is nothing to hold onto but Emil, and Emil is slipping away very quickly. Perhaps an hour ago he was still able to walk with Lalli’s help. Now he cannot hold his eyes open and his body grows ever lighter. Lalli has found the dying tend to do that; the body tries to vacate as much of itself as possible before the soul escapes, leaving what remains trapped to rot. Emil will keep shrivelling as long as it takes Lalli to find enough cover to tend to him (and may the gods be cursed for making this country so damned flat and accessible, for prey and their predators alike), which can’t be much longer.  
And even with the shrinking, Emil is heavy. He may be short, but holy Tuonela, did Ukko cram every inch with dense muscle when he made Emil. It’s like carrying an ox on his back. According to Tuuri (who heard it from Emil’s gossipy uncle), Emil used to be more her shape, more soft and cuddly before he went into Cleanser training. Whatever happened there ripped the baby-fat out of everything but his face and whipped what was left into the muscular conditions one normally expects of a draught-horse. If Emil is so powerfully built, then why in the Hisii’s unutterable name does he complain about carrying heavy loads? Those whines he makes when saddled with a stack of books- those translate in any language- why does he do that, some snobbish determination not to be put to work left over from his wealthy life?

Still, Lalli can’t stop in this flat forest; Emil’s ragged breathing will attract something, a troll or a ghost or a simple wolf pack, and Lalli won’t be able to defend him. Emil will have to be totally out of reach for Lalli to fight properly. Either that, or he’ll have to literally stand over Emil.

 

More than likely, Emil’s extreme weight is just a trick of the shock Lalli is sure he is going into. The attack took him completely by surprise, as it did Sigrun and even Näkki. Now that his sense of smell is essentially useless to pinpoint one single troll in a world that’s bathed in their sickness, Näkki has had to adjust to using mainly sight and feline intuition (which he insists is a thing), and though it has been four and a half months since he began depending on these senses, he still messes up sometimes. Today, for example, he didn’t notice half a dozen giants and an upwards of fifteen trolls were on their tail until they were no longer on their tail, but in their faces, opening Emil’s chest and chewing on Sigrun the way a dog worries a rat. Lalli came away with a few bruises and one cut that stopped bleeding a long time ago, which only makes the guilt worse.

Emil is dying on his back and Sigrun is succumbing to a fever somewhere out of his reach. 

“I should have made her turn back.” says Näkki.

How, asks Lalli, we don’t speak her language.

“No, but…but we haven’t needed a common language to get stuff done. We’re good at operating without words.” Näkki drifts overhead, a listless cloud.

We aren’t infallible, points out Lalli, I think most of our worst screw-ups have happened on this mission.

“There are screw-ups, then there is getting team-mates killed. We didn’t know the last people who died from our mistakes, you know. This is Sigrun.”

She’s not dead, says Lalli and only then is he sure of it. Sigrun is not dead. She can’t be.

He does not realise he said this to Näkki until Näkki retorts: “We used to think Mom was immortal. I think we have that notion about large terrifying women because of Grandma and Mom. Not all the tall, scary ones are as powerful as those two were. Sigrun isn’t. She is probably dead. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but her sense of direction is pretty linear. She has to go out the way she came or she has no idea where she is. That’s why she takes us along, you know? Not ‘cos we’re good company. She needs to know where the Hel she is. And the last time we saw her she was half-way into a fever coma and hip-deep in troll. The sooner we start to accept it the sooner we can-”

Näkki, says Lalli. And that is enough to quiet him.

Emil seems to get fractionally heavier with every step Lalli takes. His own body aches and protests at walking so far with such a heavy burden. His heart has not stopped hammering since the attack nearly two hours ago. That can’t be good.

“I wish we could bury her. For once, I just want to bury someone. And I want them to stay buried.”

Lalli winces at a memory and pushes it away before the thing can surface properly: don’t talk to me about that right now.

“Lalli-”

Näkki, please, I’m as upset as you are. I’m not gonna sit down and cry about it. When I say I’m upset you’re just have to going to trust that I am fucking upset without the hysterical displays of emotion you want from me, so do me a favour and shut your muzzle for maybe two fucking minutes.

“Lalli-”

Näkki, for the love of Ukko-

“What’s the Christian version of a mosque?”

For the first time in a long time, Lalli stops cold in his tracks. Previously he decided if he stopped walking he wouldn’t be able to move another inch, and, feeling a cold flush of relief tempered by panic entering his muscles at last, freezing him where he stands, Lalli wonders if he is going to die on his feet.

“Why would you ask that?” asks Lalli aloud.

“It’s a church, right?”

They have only ever seen one church; Keuruu used hers, like many other towns, as a place of refuge for the sick and newly homeless. Hundreds or thousands of infected gathering under one roof is a recipe for disaster, of course, so most of the churches essentially turned into snail-like shells for the biggest Giants ever seen in Finland. They were all burned or abandoned in the early days of the Rash. Lalli clearly remembers the one he saw on the way to Keuruu, just before they reached the city. Onni wouldn’t let Ville wake up Tuuri so she could see as well and tried to cover his and Ville’s eyes, but Lalli got on top of the convoy’s roof, out of his reach, and stared at the distant thing over-flowing from its brick confines until it was out of sight.  
Since then the only place of worship he has ever seen is the mosque near the Cultural Centre in Keuruu. It started life as some kind of office building and evolved into a mosque when the early Islamic population of Keuruu wanted a place to do their prayers, where they could lower their weapons and touch their foreheads to the earth without fear of being taken by surprise. He went in a couple of times to dodge a rain shower or to carry a message on to the imam, and it always seemed strange to him that worship was relegated to one building. In his mind, the gods (or God, in this case) were carried in your heart at all times. Making a building for God was to him more like making a cage for God than a house.

“A church.” says Lalli “Why?”

“I see a church. Maybe a third of a kilometre. We should check it out.”

“Churches are death-traps.”

“This one is empty.”

“You mean it hasn’t got Giant’s legs sticking out of the windows. We can’t take the chance.”

Näkki turns his luminous eyes down on him “Yes we can. Emil needs it. Can’t you tell from his breathing? One of his lungs is collapsing. He needs help right now.”

Lalli is moving off towards the church before Näkki can finish his sentence. 

 

 

Sigrun knows she should be shivering with the cold, but the sickly heat of the fever burning merrily under her skin keeps her from feeling any of it but the gentlest nip on the tip of her nose. The fever set in during the expedition out to the old hospital. Mikkel told her to turn back at the first hint of a spreading of the warmth in her damaged arm. The one dose of meds she had had since admitting her arm was still a bother wouldn’t be enough to save her, he said.   
Mikkel also told her he just had a ‘hunch’ that the supplies Tuuri needed to survive the coming weeks were stashed in that hospital, and they were, safe and intact and immaculately stored as if waiting for them, and because of this, Sigrun has grown a tad sceptical about Mikkel’s advice. He should not know these things. He should not even be able to guess at these things, much less at the exact location of the cure they’re looking for. She wants badly to trust him, but then she has wanted many things that life has deprived her of. Safety, dreamless sleep, a steady romantic partner, sometimes a sibling.

Life has been generous in other ways, however, as Uncle Trond swiftly pointed out each time she began to complain of what she lacked.  
“If we could harness your stamina and stick you up in the power grid, Dalsnes would never have to worry about a power shortage ever again. When you chose to use it you certainly have a brain under that messy hair. Weather permitting, your nose can be used as a sundial, so you don’t have to worry about losing track of time. You’re blessed with a loving family. Not everyone can claim that, so shut your whining trap and go do something useful with your health and youth.”

Youth. Not so much anymore. She is the second oldest living human out here, at thirty. Youth used to mean subordination, but her only elder out here is an underling, perhaps a duplicitous one at that. Even with the fever baking her thoughts Sigrun knows she was right to suspect Mikkel from the start. His pretence of incompetence and casual laziness. The way he seemed to be learning medicine even as he opened his medical kit. The way he knew- he knows- where every hospital from the bridge to this gods-forsaken corner of Denmark is and what it might have inside it, and the way he just cannot pass up the chance to coerce the team into them. Something is wrong about him. She wishes she was sure she’ll live to discover what.

Maybe, if she gets back to the Known World, and if she survives her military service up to whatever age they will force her to resign, Sigrun will become an old woman. A cranky old woman whose hobbies include brooding and tormenting her adopted niblings with grim predictions concerning their own youth and strength, just like Trond. A husband of her own too, perhaps? If acerbic old Trond landed a man then there is no way she won’t.

The possibility of living to see Dalsnes again becomes ever more remote. It was bad enough to weather a troll attack mostly on her own. Using most of her strength to battle a dangerous combination of the swift, darting troll that must have been dogs or pigs or children, and a few of the huge lumbering trolls that are made of several people and sometimes large farm animals. Killing a giant, even the small sort she faced today, is no mean feat, and neither is killing several giants in quick succession. She ruined her arm in the process. The good one is scored with tooth-marks. The bad one is as hot as if it was made of live coals. The rest of her is a mess too. There were so many trolls. So many, so fast.

Finally, her health has failed her. That famous mettle, which kept her on her feet when the rest of the children in Dalsnes were floored with the ‘flu, which allowed her to run from the hospital back to the battle-field in half the time her peers needed, that has gone. The strain she put on her arm with neglect has finally grown too much. Health has sagged, collapsed and scattered to the four winds.  
She should have trusted Mikkel. Shunted pride and caution to the side, and told the boys it was time to head back. Granted, she would have had to send them back before they had a chance to gather anything for Tuuri or left the boys to finish the job without her. At the time, she convinced herself the second option was unconscionable. How could she justify leaving Emil and Lalli on their own, unable to communicate? Lalli could be trusted to defend himself. A night scout always can. 

But, Emil.   
Sigrun couldn’t trust Emil to protect himself. And she couldn’t put the weight of Emil’s life on Lalli’s narrow shoulders, could she? She couldn’t, really, because his life is so heavy on her she has to force herself to move with its burden and it would have flattened Lalli- did she just get him killed? A nineteen-year-old. A baby, really, and she let him follow her into the closest equivalent of Helheim the mortal world can offer and now he’s dead, he has to be, because underneath all the red of his blood she saw a pasty white that could only be ribs seeing the light of day for the first time-

No, it had to be her duty as the most experienced and accomplished of them, to ford on through the Silent World until they found what Tuuri needed then return victorious. Of course she was the one to shoulder all those lives- only her shoulders are broad enough to crowd them all on. No way she would let anyone share the weight.  
And look where that got them. She has no idea where the boys are right now (or where she is for that matter), but Emil must be nearing Walhalla. Wherever Emil is Lalli will be; he scooped Emil up shortly before the second wave of trolls came out and dragged him away from the action. Lalli won’t leave Emil as long as a breath of air remains in his lungs.

A selfish part of her grouses that Lalli did not grab her instead. He was closer to Emil- close enough to be splashed when Emil’s chest was rent open- but why didn’t he wait? Why did he run? Why did he run with what was essentially a warm corpse and leave her to fight the rest off- 

The wave of heat that radiates from her arm is so intense and sickening Sigrun falls to her knees, one at a time. She claps her good hand over her mouth and forces the bile back down her throat. There is a layer of muffling wool between her skin and muscle that makes movement an unbearable strain. Her head is packed with razors, heated to the point of melting. Liquid metal might be pouring out of her ears. Unable to bear the heat, Sigrun ignores everything she has ever learned about avoiding hypothermia and strips her jacket off. Flinging it blindly into the snow behind her, she grabs a boot and rips that off too. So much blood. Everything is covered in dead blood.   
But the sudden strenuous movement drains her almost completely of her energy; she sags onto her belly and, with a gargantuan effort, turns on her side so as not to drown a puddle of snow melted by her breath. Through foggy eyes, she sees a cove of shadow pressed into the hollow of some tree roots. A more primal Sigrun takes over and compels her to inch forwards, hand-over-hand, and slip into the womb-like darkness. She curls up in the dank warmth. Her fever shakes her. Teeth chatter inside her head.

“I’ve got to get it off.” she mutters to no one. Her arm sends out a fresh wave of gross heat in response.

After that there is little Sigrun can do but sink into the hot dark and pray to gods whose names are obscured in the fever that she will live.

 

“We have a contingency plan, of course.”

Mikkel starts: he didn’t hear Tuuri creep up to join him at the edge of camp. He didn’t think she would leave the relative safety of the Tank to come and stare fruitlessly at the dead hamlet that has swallowed half of the crew. She has barely left her bed since she finished patching the hole in the floor, almost a week ago.

Mikkel wraps an arm around her shoulder “Of course.”

She leans into him gratefully “And when does that go into effect?”

Tuuri heard the conversation that established the contingency. He and Sigrun were talking over her head when it was finalised. But it becomes clear she will not speak until he speaks, and he is forced to come out with it.

“In eight days. If they’re not back in eight days, we leave as we are.”

Tuuri sniffs. The bags under her eyes seem deeper than they were this morning “Why eight days? Why not make it an even week?”

Something like six weeks ago, Sigrun suggested they add an extra day for good luck and laughed at him when he rolled his eyes.   
“Sigrun’s orders.”

“You’re giving the orders, now.”

“I suppose.”

Tuuri turns her big grey eyes up at him. He has learned to hate those eyes, when they are wide and dull with exhaustion. Nothing good is ever thought behind those eyes when Tuuri looks like that.  
“Do you think we should kill me, or what? Obviously the cure isn’t coming if they aren’t coming. So do I die at the end of eight days if they aren’t back?”

“I suppose.” he repeats uselessly. Words of comfort come and go, turning to sawdust in his mouth. He knows what to tell a dying person, of course, but he has never known what to say to a dying person whom he has grown to love. He didn’t know what to say to Maja. She died frightened and confused. Now the same thing will happen kilometres away from Kastrup to a woman Maja never knew and Mikkel never expected to know.  
With this on his mind, however, an entirely unexpected thing comes out of his mouth: “If they aren’t back in two days I’ll go to the hospital myself.”

Tuuri coughs on an exclamation of surprise. She shakes against him. The coughing fits are getting worse. All she can do is hang onto him as her ribs bounce and her jaw scrapes, and all he can do is support her until the fit has subsided. 

When her breathing is calm again, Tuuri mutters into his jacket “You must really want that cure.”

For her. For Reynir. The true purpose of his mission was moved to the back-burner a long time ago. Mikkel can’t exactly pinpoint the time when the crew became more important to him than his real work, but he does not want to correct himself.   
“Don’t you?”

“I want my cousin. And the others. Mostly I just want to sleep until they’re back. Could you do that? Sedate me until they come back, then stick me with some adrenaline?”

Seeing that she is only half-serious, Mikkel laughs “I’ll have to put Reynir down too. He’ll drive me mad without you around to buffer.”

Hearing his name, Reynir pops his head out of the Tank “What’s going on? Are they back?”

“No.” Tuuri coughs into her elbow “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh ok.” Reynir is only crestfallen for a moment “I’ll see if I can find Lalli. He- he’ll fall asleep sometime, right? When he does, I’ll be in his haven.”  
Already Reynir is talking like Lalli is completely out of reach. As if the only way the others will return is by means of a rescue mission. Mikkel wills himself to stay strong in front of the kids, though he would like nothing more than to pound the snow with his fists. If Sigrun and the boys die, then it is on him. There is no one to blame but himself. Sure, if he wanted to stretch himself he could claim it was the Shadow Council’s fault for sending him on the mission, or Tuuri’s fault for coming out into the Silence as vulnerable to the Rash as she is, or the Rash for existing in the first place.

But all the posturing and finger-pointing in the world won’t change the fact that Sigrun listened to him when he said “We can still save her” and trusted him enough to go where he directed her. And if she does not come back? Well, that’s just one more corpse on the pile.

Mikkel and Tuuri have their backs to him and have switched back to Swedish and Danish. Reynir doesn’t retreat yet, however, because he has caught a glimpse of a wispy mane and a body like smoke. The pale thing sways slightly on its many hooves, just inside the tree-line. 

Perhaps it would attack, if Reynir wasn’t standing here. Perhaps it is still not strong enough.

“It’s afraid of us,” Lalli told him a few nights before, just after the monster had promised it would never leave them alone for as long as it existed “That’s why it doesn’t attack.”

“Nothing to do with the giant rune we painted on the back of the Tank?” he returned nervously, which made Lalli smile. Up to that moment Reynir didn’t know Lalli could smile at all.

“That’s what it’s afraid of. If you can make a rune like that and I can summon a goddess-”

“But that was Onni.”

“Not as far as the monster knows. It can tell we’re strong. We almost killed it the first time. Gods willing, the next time we will finish it. From now on both of us are going to need to be vigilant and prepared. This is going to be a painful war of attrition- do you understand a word I’m saying? I can barely decipher expressions, Reynir, you’re going to have to speak up if I’ve lost you.”

Reynir had shaken his head and smiled at his fylgja, knowing she was thinking the same thing “No, I get it. This is just the most I’ve ever heard you say at once. When we’re awake you just whistle or throw something when you need me, and even in our havens you don’t talk that much.”

Lalli shrugged “I’m a man of few words, apparently. We can still work together on this.”

“Of course! Of course, I didn’t doubt you for a second!”

Up until a few moments ago, when Reynir laid on his back formulating an apology to Lalli for so far being useless apart from his runes, it did not occur to him that they might not come back. All three of them could die in the worst case scenario. Even in the best case, it is not likely that more than two will come back. He should have made Sigrun stay behind- Reynir could tell she was getting a fever from the glaze over her eyes and her slow, awkward movements, but he didn’t think it his place to tell her what to do.   
He catches himself praying almost unconsciously that if anyone returns, it will be Lalli. Reynir lays a hand against his forehead and curses himself quietly.

Inside the tree-line, the monster paces unsteadily. It stumbles a lot and seems to have trouble moving in a straight line, but it is still moving.

“Please,” Reynir whispers “Bring him back. I can’t fight it off on my own.”


	2. Things continue falling apart, particularly Sigrun and Emil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up: everyone's favourite ghostly pastor, and a bonus selfish spirit made of water.

The church is not, as they had hoped, empty. But neither is there a troll peering out of the weathered steeple. Lalli is not quite sure who it is standing outside the church. A woman, he thinks, dressed in an old oddly styled outfit that tells him she was some sort of priestess in the old world when she died with a starched collar and flowing black robes over pressed trousers. Again, what a weird concept; putting the priests and priestesses and the shamans in a stone house where God supposedly dwelled. Lalli is used to finding his religious figureheads wandering the wilds with mossy boots and dirt under their fingernails.  
Unaware of her guests, the woman remains crouched at the grassy bank of a thin river of clear water. Lalli does not need to see the bottom to guess fish must swim in the depths of it, glutting on algae and each other. These sorts of conditions should have died out with the winter. The river should be a ribbon of ice and the fish, fled for warmer parts or dead. Not only has Lalli apparently found the last vestiges of Christianity, but he found it nestled in those rare bubbles of permanent spring weather a nature spirit will occasionally weave around its environment so they don’t have to put up with the trouble of wilting and withering when the winter frosts set in. 

They are at the edge of the pine forest, which ends in an abrupt clearing around the church. A cracked black scar winds away into the woods, choked by weeds and the encroach of tree-roots. Probably an old road leading to the town where the cure was. Ok, that’s good. That means Lalli has a clear path to return along once Emil is on his feet again. The sound of Emil’s breathing is inhuman now- Lalli would think it was a rusty door creaking on its hinges if he did not have the true source of the noise bleeding all over his back.   
The church sits in the green shadows of a small and obscenely healthy grove of rowan and oak with a smattering of pine. A lone weeping willow crouches on the bank opposite to the priestess. She hums under her breath, totally unaware of her company.

“What do we do?” mutters Näkki.

The church is there. It is no illusion, but it neither does it belong to the landscape. Seems that this pocket of health has also preserved the structural integrity of the church, which means it could be easily defended if they end up in another siege situation. 

Lalli cannot think of what to do or say. Normally, this is difficult for him, because other humans are confusing and even those who speak Finnish speak an entirely foreign language to him. But he has no way of guaranteeing Emil’s safety with this strange priestess. What if she turns them away? What if she would rather sacrifice him to her god than provide sanctuary? What if she and the church and the whole bubble are only in this plane of existence for a brief moment, and will wink out of existence the moment he takes another step closer?  
Then Emil makes a sound like a wind-sock being ripped off its post and Lalli concludes aloud: “Fuck it. Let’s go.” and strides up to the church with the confidence of a regular parishioner.

When the priestess looks up and sees him, this is exactly what she sees. The sight of living human being (two, in fact, though the second cannot be long for this world) is so weird her brain rejects the idea entirely and decides some of the local ghosts have found their way to her church at last.

The priestess stands and calls out “Hello?”   
At this moment she sees the cat made of shimmering light that stalks mist-like over the ground beside the man on his feet and decides these are not ghosts after all. What’s more she thinks she knows who she is looking at. The family resemblance is striking. Eerie, in fact.

“Hotakainen.” she says, inwardly pleased that her Finnish accent is still so good after so many years without practice “You’re a Hotakainen-”

“Finnish!” screeches the lynx in a combination of triumph and fear “Finnish in this zombie berg?”

The sight of a lynx talking, let alone an ethereal lynx made of thin silver-blue lights, is so weird the priestess again has no choice but to dismiss this detail for now, trusting that she will ponder it out later, and continues “Your brother was here maybe a month ago…”

The man, the Hotakainen, stops and affixes her with an icy stare. The stare he’s using Tuuri has often compared to the one a bear gives when it has spotted a human encroaching on its territory: ‘one more step and you won’t have legs to carry you away from me’. As the look has done with people, spirits and even a few trolls in the past, it stops the priestess in her tracks, and recalls her to a moment some ninety-six years ago when she walked into her office in the backrooms of the church and found a wolf with blood on its muzzle and a satisfied look on its face sleeping on top of her desk. That wolf had eaten the Sunday School’s pet hamster. She was lucky enough to get it removed without further trouble with a simple call to Animal Control, and wishes desperately she still had the resource.

“Was he dead?” says the man.

The priestess cannot stop staring at the bloody person on his back. She wonders if he is responsible for the obvious maiming, perhaps looking for a quiet nook to finish his prey off.

“Who?” she blurts “Your brother? No. He was alive.”

“Then it wasn’t my brother.”

“Speaking of dead,” says Näkki “We got a dying man over here. Mind if we use your mosque- church, I said church- to shelter him? Otherwise he’s gonna die. Fast.”

The priestess, who has told others to call her Pastor A in the past and will do it again soon, has little to no memory of her past life. She remembers small, incidental things such as the smell of a microwaved dinner and stories from her former parish, like the wolf and that the name of the organist was an Igbo one and that she used to pass through the outer-edges of the town nearby to reach her home. What went on in that home and who might have lived with her there are mysteries. Her family, if she had any, are lost to her completely, as are most of the books she read and the movies she watched and the poems she could recite on demand. On a good day she can remember the most basic of the prayers she lead in her church. On a bad day, she cannot remember the name of the god she lingers to serve. 

“What got him?” she advances cautiously.

The Hotakainen stops at the edge of the pocket “A troll.”

“Where?”

He will not advance into the bubble, from the border of snow into green. The priestess thinks this is not a good idea. She cannot remember why, nor can she hang onto the thought long enough to tell him to stay put “Opened his chest. At least one lung collapsed. His chest is bound shut right now, but if the bindings come off I think he might lose something major.”

The priestess is now off the bank and walking steadily towards them “How did you keep him from bleeding out?”

“I did,” the lynx rises to the bleeding man’s shoulder “I have a little healing ability. The seal’s broken three times, though, so evidently I don’t have enough power to keep him intact permanently. Can’t do a thing about the inside damage either.”

Casting a nervous glance at the river, the priestess stops just in front of them..   
“I don’t know if I can help you. He needs to be stabilised. Do you have a phone? We need an ambulance.” her eyes are suddenly distant and confused.

“Lalli,” mutters Näkki in the voice that only he can hear “This lady’s crazy. Degraded. Maybe we don’t take instructions from the crazy lady?”

Maybe, says Lalli.  
At that moment one of the lesser cuts on Emil’s temple lets out a fresh spurt of blood, which sloughs down Lalli’s collar and begins to slime down the length of his spine. That is all the encouragement Lalli needs. He doesn’t know what he can do for Emil, but he can do it more easily once inside the church.

The priestess is still thinking about ambulances and whether they are the right thing to call- or are they the ones to put out fires? So she does not notice Lalli has crossed the border of snow and grass until the river explodes behind them, and a familiar voice fills her with dread.

“If you think you’re bringing that corpse into my glade you have another thing coming!”

 

Some kilometres away, Sigrun is visiting with her mother.  
Sigrun is surprised at how comfortably her mother has squeezed into this cove of roots; her mother is not a tall woman, but she is not by any means a small woman. There’s a lot of muscle mass and flesh to fit in beside her. On top of all that, Sigrun knows herself to be a column of muscle, skinny as she is, and it’s never been easy for her to compress herself, to reduce the space she takes up as a matter of principle. 

Yet here they are. Mother and daughter, nearly spooning in the roots.

“…Uncle Trond said your Uncle U-P’s getting nervous. He’s seen you driving in Dalsnes, and he says that’s enough to give him cause to think you’ll never come back alive.”

Sigrun snorts and wipes the sweat from her eyes “Well you can tell Uncle U-P I’m not driving. Tell him we got this fiery dollop of a Finn driving instead. Grey hair, grey eyes…she and her cousin kinda look like ghosts. Sometimes I look up in the cockpit and I think ‘oh shit, a vampire is driving!’ and then I remind myself she just looks like that naturally.”

“What’s her name? This dollop of a Finn?”

“You know what? I want to say it’s Lalli, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. I know one of them is named Lalli. Either that or Onni…or maybe the cat’s name is Lalli.” her throat has begun to sear. She has tried with untold mouthfuls of snow to soothe the wet burning sensation, to no avail.

“When did you get a cat?” her mother chuckles “Your poor team. As if having one feral thing in the tank isn’t enough.”

“Hey,” Sigrun coughs weakly “I am not feral. I’m just very, very energetic.”

“Sigrun,” her mother pats at a lump around the breastbone of her coat “What’s this you’re wearing?”

Wearily, Sigrun fishes a pendant out of her coat “This? Oh, this is our bonus mage’s work. He’s been practicing with his whittling. He made a pendant out of the Thor rune from the ancient alphabet and I couldn’t say no when he put it on me. Literally. We don’t speak the same language.”

“A fine gift. You should wear it on the outside of your coat.” her mother smooths the pendant so that it hangs down Sigrun’s chest, smiling radiantly at her daughter “I’m so glad your team is working out well. Even the stow-away.”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, Mom. You’re awesome, you know? I love you a lot, you and dad and my uncles, but I think you’re not actually here.”

Her mother’s expression is of perfect innocence “Of course I’m here. I came out to see you.”

“On what, a fucking snow-mobile? Mom I’m in the middle of Denmark’s Silence. There’s no way you got out here to see me.”

“You underestimate your mother.”

“I underestimate my fever,” she shoots back, turning away from her mother to the dark part of her bed of roots “You’re a fever dream. Go away. Let me have some peace.”

Her mother falls silent. For a long time Sigrun only hears her own roaring pulse and laboured breathing. She drifts in and out of something like sleep, but she cannot tell if that which is in front of her eyes are dreams or a reality. When she turns to face freezing outside to scoop some snow against her flushed face, she catches the eyes of a silvery thing. It perches on a fallen branch just in front of her. The eyes meeting hers are wide and bright. Curious, maybe. Sigrun gets the impression the silvery thing wants to reach out a little clawed hand and nick the tip of her nose. Sigrun wants to do very much the same.  
She closes her eyes, intending only to blink, and cannot persuade her eyelids to move again for a long time. Not until she feels a hand graze her forehead, brushing the sweaty hair back from her face.

“Hey Em.”

“Hey.”

“Let me see you. Sit up properly.”

As she suspected, when he straightens up there is no sign of blood anywhere on him. Not so much as a scratch either. He is whole and perfect.

“Are you dead?”

He shakes his head “I don’t think so.”

“I think you’re another hallucination.”

“Is it true the dying do that? What kinds of stuff are you seeing?”

“Now wait just a minute, brat,” with a supreme effort she drags herself out of the hollow of roots and comes to her knees, leaning heavily on her palms. Emil scoots back in faint alarm. He steadies her with a hand on her shoulder, which just angers her further “What makes you think I’m dying?” she spits.

“What do you mean?” he snaps back. She was surprised when he started to do that. It was like discovering an infant had learned to walk on its own, somehow without the coaching or encouragement from her that was normally necessary “Of course you’re dying. You’re a mess! I could fry an egg on your forehead. Not to mention how much you’re sweating. Those clothes will be soaked through in a while, and when the sweat chills, you will too. Your clothes might even freeze with you inside them. You’ll die of hypothermia long before your arm can get you.”

Sigrun considers smacking him. Not hard- she couldn’t manage a punch. And she doesn’t want to hit him. Just a cuff, to remind him who’s the boss.

She growls “I’m not dying.”

“Yes you are. Your body is dying.” 

“I’m not dying.”

Emil isn’t listening anymore. He squeezes her shoulder tight, aiming his eyes at the ground as if that might stop her from seeing they have grown wet “You know I didn’t want to believe your stories. The ones about the Vikings, they were cool, but I wasn’t raised like that. I thought you were just talking to inspire me to be stronger. Or to have something to say when we went out on a mission. Lalli and Reynir are opening my eyes, I think, to…to the other worlds there are, which I was never taught. But you’re still all talk. Even worse? You’re a liar now. Lalli and Reynir have proved themselves. You haven’t. You filled my head with stories about heroic Vikings made super-human heroes by the gods who looked after them. A Viking can do anything they set their minds to as long as they have the love of their gods. You- you pray. I see you pray. I hear you pray. All the time. Every time you get something done, you say ‘don’t thank me, Em, thank the gods for their favour’. Last time there was a lightning storm you went out after and applauded Thor for his good work. But look at you. You’re dying. They’re going to let you die in a foreign, sick land of a fever you shouldn’t have, from hypothermia of all things. Is that a Viking way to go? You’re dying as a pathetically sick woman all on her own. The only reason a person who loves their gods as much as you do would die like that is because the gods are nothing but fairy-tales for the weak like me.”

“Emil-”

“No,” he is soft and defeated “No. I don’t want to hear anymore. I don’t want to hear about the gods’ will or whatever shit you’re about to say.”

Sigrun lets out a long sigh that shakes her rib-cage. She waits for a fresh attack, and when none comes, she finds the right words: “Before you and I met, your family told me about you. Your aunt and uncle love you a lot. They wanted me to know what you went through as a little kid, so I could help you out, I think. And I wanted to. So badly… I heard about this brave little brat of a kid who survives the worst parents, who runs away from his home. He tries to learn to work hard and be kind, but he hasn’t really got a role model or a guide. His new family want to help, but they had to give up so much to keep him safe. So he joins the military on a stupid whim. He wants to find more of the world, maybe of himself… I thought I could help you. The gods, I thought the gods could too, because they love the brave best of all. I just wanted you to know the world’s bigger than the people who are cruel or inferior to you. There’s so much more for you.”

He lets go of her shoulder. Sigrun leans forwards, bringing her forehead to her knees. She coughs. A violent shivering takes ahold of her from the waist down, which she makes no efforts to resist.

“I’m sorry, Em. I want to do right by you.”

No reply. When she summons the strength to look up Emil is gone.

 

“That man is already dead!” 

Two feet above the churning surface of the river, a woman in a gown of clear water hovers with arms spread wide and a poisonous look on her fluid features. 

“That man is already dead,” she repeats, as Lalli carefully lowers Emil to the ground “And I won’t have you bringing death to my glade! I’ve worked for ninety-one long years to keep this place clean of the bad spirits, you know. I can smell the bad in him. That man will rot inside his body and when he wakes up dead, he’ll make my life and Pastor A’s a living Hel, so you can take your dead friend and take him back where you came from.” The woman rides her spout of water to the grassy bank and marches towards them.

Lalli and Näkki exchange a look. 

“I don’t suppose you’re willing to negotiate?” asks Näkki.

The woman turns her venomous stare on the priestess, apparently Pastor A “Did you promise them my healing? I won’t waste my energy on that! It could make our bubble collapse if I do.”

While Pastor A is protesting both her innocence and her companion’s selfishness, Lalli thinks very quickly. Of the several courses of action available to him he is sure the action he selects is the fastest, the easiest way to ensure Emil will not expire on the ground while people bicker over his body. The woman from the river does not notice him draw his pukko. Nor does she notice Näkki’s hackles rise. The woman has stopped over Emil and is far too busy glaring at Emil in disgust to notice Lalli advance until it is already too late, she is within arm’s reach, and even as she lifts her arms to defend herself and the river responds with a roar, the pukko slashes her open at the collar-bone.

Since her entire being is composed of ever-shifting water, the woman probably does not expect to be hurt. Even Lalli is in equal parts surprised and relieved to see her blueish skin rent open and spew an algae-like slime. A splash lands on Emil’s neck, but he doesn’t react. 

Now it is Näkki’s turn. The woman is still in shock from being wounded by what she thought was a common knife and does not realise Näkki has moved until he is upon her. At the last second she throws an arm up in front of her face. Näkki sinks his teeth into her arm, finds a purchase for his paws in her dress and flesh, and whips his head from side-to-side. Her fist clocks him in the side of the head and tosses him metres away. Näkki goes with a piece of green-stained flesh locked in his jaws. He rolls in mid-air and is rounding for a second attack when Lalli steps in between him and the woman.

She pants, clutching at her many wounds. They do not seem to cause her pain so much as they are a source of embarrassment; she cannot believe she has just been bested by this slip of a mortal she didn’t think to identify as a mage until his silver cat ragged her flesh.

“You have healing in you.” says Lalli.

“Obviously. Nothing can hurt me. Nothing can destroy me,” she pulls the collar of her shredded dress up over the gash in her collar-bone “You’re only attacking a vessel, you impertinent mor-”

He asks brusquely “And will you share it now?” 

“You come into my home without invitation and attack me without warning, then you expect me to give of my energy freely?”

Näkki approximates a shrug with his shoulders “Well you’d kinda be a bastard not to, don’t’cha think? First living humans you see in, what, ninety-one years and you turn us away just because we didn’t let you know we were coming? The only reason we attacked you is because you were getting all up in Emil’s face. We thought you might hurt him worse.”

“Or kill him completely.” finishes Lalli. 

Her eyes fall on Emil’s prone figure, turning the grass spongey with his blood. She scoffs “Pastor, you have nothing to say about this?”

The Pastor crosses her arms “You are being an absolute bastard. Just help the boy. It won’t diminish you in the slightest, you selfish thing.”

“And if you don’t,” adds Näkki helpfully “We’re going to do a little more than ‘diminish’ you.” 

At last, he loosens his jaw and lets the scrap of flesh fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Näkki is a little weird to work with. I'm not sure if he's supposed to be the aggressive side of Lalli or the assertive side. Is he both? Or is he just the culmination of the two into the ultimate internalised jerk-persona produced by Lalli's latent frustration at the world? The jerk one, probably.


	3. In the throes of death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short chapter. I've got to go to Sydney for about two days to renew a passport because there isn't an American embassy where I live.

Sigrun is a corpse. Probably. Either a very, very fresh corpse whose soul has only just left for Walhalla, or she is so close to death her faculties of non-automatic movement have deserted, leaving her stranded in a useless body. All she can do is breathe and wait to expire. Perhaps she died or is dying with her eyes open. It feels as if they are open, but she cannot tell because of the hot blackness enveloping her. Sigrun has spent more than her fair share of time sheltering under fresh bodies from trolls and other predators, so she recognises the feeling easily enough. A human body makes a uniquely clammy variety of heat, especially in multitudes.  
Sigrun suspects she died or is dying towards the bottom of a pile of fellow fallen. She cannot really tell if the ground is yielding the way a dead body does before rigor mortis sets in, or if it’s a spring grass that feels so soft beneath her back.

It does not matter. Sigrun is also fairly certain she is not actually this corpse or near-corpse. In the height of her fever, her mind is still playing tricks on her. What she feels must be no more than an illusion; an illusion conjured up and realised by Mikkel’s stories of Kastrup.   
He did not want to talk about it, at first. Trond had been the one to reveal to her Mikkel was present at all. This was during the third day they had known each other and Trond revealed it in a passing comment. He had his eyes on the country speeding by the train windows and pointed out an elderly blockade of rusted cars that must have been built in the earliest of days of the Rash.

“I heard there blockades as high as those at Kastrup,” he remarked to Mikkel “To block the trolls out.”

“In the first few days. Later, it was simpler to bring up the dead to the top of the blockade and toss them over to distract the trolls than it was to reinforce.”

Sigrun had had the misfortune to be taking a slug from her water-skin as Mikkel said this and spilled half the water down her front, snorting what was in her mouth all over the window. Given her entirely unsubtle reaction to that first remark, it was a long time before Sigrun could persuade Mikkel to open up to her. Sometimes he’d use an abridged version of what she later discovered were long horror stories to warn Emil away from a danger, or to persuade Tuuri to stay bent over the her books and engine when she expressed a wish to tag along on the recon. But he remained closed to Sigrun.  
For a long time she thought of Mikkel like a large zit; if she kept the pressure up, he would soon burst with a satisfying pop. However, the more she got to know him, the more Sigrun realised Mikkel might be one of those rare people who truly will not allow themselves to be poked and prodded into doing something even if it is slightly against their will. When Mikkel has made up his mind, the only thing that can change it is reasoned argument and organised debate. Not the steady whaling of force she was accustomed to using to get her way with underlings, particularly the difficult things.

So she left off. For something like two months she said not a word about Kastrup except as a vague comparison when Tuuri asked for one of her own war stories. Mikkel prepared himself silently and steadily, and one day sat down beside her to watch Emil making a brave attempt to help Reynir comb his hair out. It was like watching a red octopus eat one of those hapless virgin princesses that seem to abound in the Ancient Greek stories her Uncle U-P will occasionally tell. 

“Do you know anyone who was at Kastrup?” he said.

Sigrun, again, had the misfortune to have her mouth full with a slug from her water-skin. She sprayed a fine mist from both nostrils as Lalli went by, prompting a slew of indignant Finnish.

“Apart from you?” she hacked “Uh, like, two people? I think? My Uncle U-P is one of them.”

“U-P?”

“Ukko-Pekka. He did some scouting there, but he left before the battle really got underway. Got opened from hip to sternum on the first day. The only reason he survived is because my Uncle Trond promised he’d fire every medic he had jurisdiction over if they let his husband die. The other one was just this woman who used to live a few streets down from my folks when I was still a Lieutenant. She hanged herself.”

Mikkel clucked his tongue in a pitying manner “You probably know more than just two. Not everyone likes to admit to having been present at Kastrup. I wouldn’t have told you at all, except for your Uncle’s loose tongue.”

Sigrun felt a pang of embarrassment for her uncle, and then a fiercer one for herself considering the way she had leaned on Mikkel so mercilessly before “’Cos people like me who weren’t there needle you about it all the time?”

“Partly. Mostly because Kastrup was...let’s go with ‘bad’. It was very, very bad and I don’t want to think about it anymore than I already do under my own steam.”

“I won’t ask again.” she promised. And she did not. But Mikkel talked anyway. In drips and drabs, like a wound bleeding determinedly past the scab that was supposed to clot it shut.   
Obviously enough of it has came out that it affected her; affected her enough to join her fever dreams.

The ground shifts beneath her; it is no longer soft, it is no longer yielding, but a crust of ice and snow that sucks the warmth from her very marrow the way wolves might once the fever has made an offering to the woods of her corpse. Aware of being on her knees, Sigrun gropes blindly to her side and, finding a grasp on a tree branch, tries to stand. Centimetre by centimetre she rises with minute adjustments to her legs, then her muscles, then winches herself out of the snow. The branch groans in protest against her weight. Sigrun could not care less. Even if the branch snaps under her in the next second she managed to get up.

“I’m not dying!” Sigrun surprises herself with a hoarse shout. She glances around, in case Emil has come back to listen to her “Do you hear me? I refuse to die here!”

How does a Viking get a proper death when her only enemy is an infection? Do antibodies count as weapons? The way Sigrun was taught, anything used to protect herself or another is qualified as a death-weapon if the Viking dies using it. A mother protecting her children to the death with only her bare hands is just as welcome in Walhalla as an Admiral refusing to let go of her harpoon gun even as the sea-beast dives deeper and drowns her in freezing water. Certainly, one is far more stubborn and possibly stupid than the other, but they should have both earned their place in a fair court of Valkyries.   
And what of herself, Sigrun wonders? Is her determination to out-last this insidious fever enough to secure her a seat in the hall of heroes?

Sigrun startles herself once more, both with her own voice and a touch of fatalism she did not know she had in her “Probably not. Em’s right. I’ll probably go straight down to Hel. Or nowhere.”

Maybe Tuonetar, or whatever god Tuuri talked about. In the past few days Tuuri has been talking a lot about her gods- specifically about how she wished she knew more of what to expect, now that it seemed quite likely she would be meeting them in person.

“Machines were my thing. Onni and Lalli and- well, and the rest of them…they were the ones with time for the gods. All the gods ever gave me was my family and enough clairvoyance in me to tell you if it’s gonna rain tomorrow. It’s not, by the way. It’s gonna snow like a bitch.”

Odin’s beard, there’s a terrifying thought! What if Sigrun’s people are wrong? What if the Finnish and Norse gods do not exist simultaneously, as she thought, but the only the Finns’ do? What if Lalli’s magic is the only real magic on this trip? Maybe he was tricking them with Reynir? Maybe Reynir is actually a Finn in disguise, sent by the gods, the Finnish gods, to trick the Norwegians and Icelanders into worshipping them while all the while they think they are paying homage to their ancestral gods? Or what if the Finnish and the Norse are only fairy-tales and all along it has been the Aztec or the Greek gods who are truly in control?

She musters her strength and venom to tilt her head back at the cloudy sky and shout “I’m not a hapless princess! I know what the fuck I’m doing! And if I’m gonna die then I ain’t gonna do it for your amusement, you bastards!”  
Spitting a wad of phlegm and blood from her cracked lips, Sigrun heaves herself off her branch-crutch and takes a heavy step forwards. 

“I’ll die on my own damn terms,” she wheezes “Not sick. Sick’s fine for some people, but not me. I’m gonna die like I live. Messy, bloody n’ screaming.”

 

She will not let him come into the water with her. On this subject, she is extremely clear.

“One of you bleeding in my water is more than enough.” the look in her eyes warns Lalli not to push his luck any further. 

So Lalli must content himself with crouching on a stone that juts out into the broad width of the river. If he is swift, he should be able to reach the river from here in time to save Emil from serious damage, should she decide she would rather drown him while he is still helpless and unconscious. Näkki turns tight circles a couple of metres above her head, which gives him a good position from which to attack should he need to. Then again if the river is really determined to kill them both, there is not much they can do against her. If he were not so close to the water he could mount a better defence against the worst; she would have to lunge to reach him, giving him time to dodge and prepare a counter-attack and all of that nonsense. Maybe he could fight her off, weakened as he is by the battle hours ago.  
But with Emil draped over her arms, Lalli has to stay close and hedge his bets. He cannot afford to give her a good reason to refuse to help at the last moment. 

She is waist-deep in the water. The shreds of her dress wave about her like a strange weed as she bleeds freely from her wounds. If these wounds bother her, she gives no sign of it The river stands stock-still, her eyes closed, her lips parted slightly over gritted teeth. Lalli recognises the expression from several nature spirits who have appeared before him as humanoids before; it’s a face they all seem to make when they’re preparing to perform some feat of wonder and awe. Seems an unnecessary waste of time to him.  
She hold Emil as easily as she might carry a long stick of firewood, sort of slung from elbow to elbow in a manner that strikes Lalli as precarious. Gods know Emil doesn’t need help looking anymore vulnerable than he does now- his skin the colour of new snow, his eyes sunken and shadowed. Emil could not look more corpse-like if he tried, though Lalli can see his chest labouring to inflate the working lung and a hard pulse in a vein standing out by his jaw-line. Somehow the pulse and the breathing only make it worse, like a crude imitation of the signs of life.

“He’ll be alright,” says Pastor A at his back “I’ve seen her do this before. Just last month she healed a deer with a mangled hind-leg. She’s really quite kind, I think, but you scared her.”

“She scared us too.” mumbles Näkki.  
Näkki has a lot more to say to her, but Lalli stops him with a severe look. The pastor has been on their side so far and Lalli intends to make every effort to see that she remains so. He is fully prepared to tie Näkki’s poisonous muzzle closed if that is what it takes. 

Pastor A has already explained what will happen to the best of her ability. She is not too clear on the process herself, and when Näkki asked why she hasn’t questioned what would be regarded as a miracle in her faith, the pastor pulled a face, looked down at her clerical outfit and muttered “Ah, yes, my faith.”  
Thusly, Lalli does not know what to expect beyond the necessity of the river dunking Emil in herself. His head should not go beneath the water- the pastor could tell him that much. Only the wound needs to be immersed. Anything further Lalli will therefore interpret as an assassination and act accordingly. 

Now, the river’s pale eyes flutter open. She glides deeper into the water until it laps at her torn breast-bone and lets Emil float flat, with a hand on the back of his head and chest respectively to keep him from drifting away in the current. Where her eyes were a pale, whitish colour before, like the gloss of water-polished stones, they have turned a violent clear blue that matches the darkest shadows of the water. Ripples spread out from her in her stillness. Little shocks send tiny waves to either bank and spray Lalli up to the ankles.   
With her warning to stay the Hel away fresh in his mind, Lalli discards his coat and gloves, then goes to work on his boots, watching the river closely all the while. All around Emil, water has begun to glow. Light the colour of a rainstorm pours out around him, turning gold in his hair and red at his wounds. Blood blossoms from his chest as Näkki’s clumsy seal rips for the fourth time, and the light bends hungrily towards it. Like grey fingers it grabs at the edges of his wounds, pulling threads of flesh together over the bone, the stringy muscle tissues, the gloss of fat and finish of a candy-pink swathe of untouched skin. Suddenly Emil gasps. His chest buckles outwards with what must be the force of the damaged lung popping back into its correct shape.

“You shouldn’t disturb her-” but Lalli brushes the pastor’s hand away and slides into the water up to his waist. 

The river’s eyes flick towards him briefly. She says nothing, throwing her head back and baring her throat to the sky. Her thin body begins to contort and rock with spasms. She lets Emil go- and Lalli is there to gather him up close and keep his chin above the water. A cloud of grey follows Emil and simmers around them, ignores Lalli and stretches over Emil in a skinny webbing that gives the impression of a mourner’s veil wrapped around his entire body.

Lalli swabs away beads of water and blood with a dry sleeve “Open your eyes.”

“Something’s wrong with him.” says Näkki.

The river’s spine cracks in half as she springs backwards violently and dissolves into the churning water. All at once the grey stuff breaks apart and slithers off of Emil like frightened snakes. Tendrils of the stuff crawl over Lalli’s hand in the process- the sensation of a thorn being drawn across his skin, only just light enough so as not to bring up blood.

“Lalli!” Näkki butts his muzzle into his shoulder “I think he’s slipped out.”

“He’s alive. He’s breathing again.”

“I know, I know, but he isn’t in there. I think Emil is dead.”

“No,” Lalli’s voice is low and hoarse “Not now.”

Näkki back-pedals and lands heavily on the rock, unable to move straight in his shock “Oh gods. Holy fuck. He fell out of his damned body. It was too much. He just fell out of his damned body.”

Lalli’s father speaks in his head now; he speaks to a version of his son that is over ten years younger in body and infinitely so in mind. The words are solemn, but Lalli is aware of being bounced up and down on his knee.  
“…soul is the mind and the mind is the soul, and like you get messed up in the head you can be messed up in the soul. If somebody’s dying in a bad way the soul might get a head-start on the body, so it doesn’t have to go on to the next lives with those painful memories. So the soul falls out like this-” Lalli is pitched to the side alarmingly and yelps, but comes up laughing as his father continues “-and goes on to see Tuonetar and the swan. When that happens, two things can happen. Maybe the body can get better and the soul will come back, if it is guided back by a mage. Or maybe the body finishes dying and the soul stays where it is.”

“He’s dead, Lalli.” Näkki’s voice snaps him back into the present.

“No,” Lalli raises his head “Not yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Emil goes to Helheim and discovers his soul is a magical golden animal!


	4. A pause in the throes of death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Alternative chapter title: Emil is dead! Long live Emil!)

As the twilight gives way into a dark night, Nanna-Elka begins to pace.

While Reynir has no idea what pacing might mean for his fylgja as an individual he does recognise the gesture from the dogs he knew on the farm. The dog’s ears will spike up in interest, and any of the goofiness inherent in a dog’s expression drains out to make way for the more primal looks of hunger and concentration that never fails to put a shiver up Reynir’s spine. The dog hops out of his lap or out of a sunbeam and trots forwards with an erect tail, sometimes a ridge of fur standing up along its spine, and more often than not lets out a low growl. Then begins the pacing- a rapid dashing back and forth to the rhythm of a constant growl.  
When his dogs did this, Reynir knew to snatch up his staff and prepare to defend his flock.  
Since so many homesteads had been abandoned by starving or sick people in the early years of the apocalypse (just with a bad strain of the good ol’ fashioned flu), most domesticated animals were forced by circumstance to revert to wild. As animals will do, they re-learned what generations of meals in tin bowls and walks on the end of leashes couldn’t scrub out of their genes and became hunters. Reynir has seen plenty of wild dog packs in his time. They make quite the sight: Malamutes and Icelandic shepherds in step with thick-furred poodles and beagles that have somehow found a way to bear the cold. Gigantic feral cats go after the lambs or the sickest of the flock. Once, an ancient Siberian tiger who had belonged to the private collection of some long-dead billionaire made off with an ewe, but not before Reynir gave it a thwack on the rump to remember him by. 

Feral dogs and cats are no problem. Even bigger animals like wolves and the dreaded grizzly bear, Reynir is fairly confident he can scare off with his old experience and new mage-y powers. But whatever has Nanna-Elka so riled up is none of those things. Whatever has her scared, Reynir knows he is nowhere near prepared to defend himself from.

Reynir watches his fylgja pace from the front-steps of the Tank. He gave the excuse that he wanted to watch for signs of the others’ return. Really, though, he just doesn’t want to have to hear Tuuri’s breathing. A few days ago Mikkel judged Tuuri was not the cauldron of infectious material he had previously announced her to be. As long as Reynir did not insert any part of Tuuri into his mouth, he was safe to come and go as he pleased. This means that Reynir has no reason to stay away from her and therefore, unfortunately, no excuse not to have to listen to her lungs straining for every breath. The noises she makes reminds him of the rattle an old sheep would make on its last breath. Except Tuuri sounds like that constantly. Her words rasp and croak around the edges. Sometimes she has to stop in mid-sentence, put her hands on her knees and suck in as hard as she can. She hunches and reddens in effort, and when she recovers, she straightens very slowly and speaks so softly he often has to ask her to repeat herself.  
Were it not for the interminable, unbearable sound of her throat Reynir would gladly follow his instinct to hunker down next to Tuuri, providing her with any and all comfort he can give whether she wants it or not. But he has let that duty fall to Mikkel for the moment, in favour of huddling up against a tearing wind and staring at a stubbornly still tree-line.

Nothing, save the foliage, moves. Nanna-Elka’s jaws dangle open and funnels steam into the air. Odd that her breath looks like his in the air. Odd that a spirit breathes at all.

Several times he has asked her what has her so agitated. Each time she has responded with a curt growl. She isn’t as talkative as Näkki. Perhaps because Reynir has only just started to communicate with her, her vocabulary is limited to imperatives like ‘make a runo’ and monosyllables. Näkki volunteered to give her a crash-course in how to speak like an awkward, which is apparently the spirits’ term for a human being, but Lalli shot this down, warning Reynir that Nanna-Elka was only going to develop her pool of expletives if Näkki was left in charge of her.   
So Reynir is left with a lowing fylgja who hardly acknowledges him and growls at enemies invisible to him.

Reynir shivers in the wind and stands, wanting to stamp some sensation back into his feet.

At his sudden movement Nanna-Elka stops and fixes him with a wide amber stare. “No.”

Wrapping his arms around himself, he promises: I’m not going anywhere. My feet are just cold.

“No,” she repeats “Stay.”

I’m not going anywhere, he repeats.

“Reynir is weak.”

Stung, Reynir can only nod helplessly. I know, Nanna-E. I’m just going to walk around the Tank.

She is satisfied and returns to her pacing with refreshed vigour. She has gone over the same ground so many times, her misty paws have actually begun leaving a furrow in the snow. Reynir will point it out to Mikkel, when Mikkel is free, just as another bit of evidence that he does in fact have a “ghost dog that protects you and instructs you on the art of runo-making”. Since seeing Emil fire a gigantic bird made of flame that sang in Finnish from his flame-thrower, Mikkel has made the tentative transition from a firm agnostic to a reluctant believer, under the condition that he is not made to worship gods he does not think much of anyway for letting the world get into its current state.   
As a kind of last defence against the world of gods he has just been made to acknowledge he remains sceptical towards Reynir’s magical abilities, so Reynir has made a point of shoving any proof of Nanna-Elka’s existence he can find under Mikkel’s majestic schnozz and daring him, in a slightly belligerent manner which makes him feel like a jerk, to use his precious science and semi-completed medical degree to explain how the proof could have come to be without the presence of an invisible and magical dog. 

Just as Reynir finishes a lap around the Tank and has reached the door again, Mikkel sticks his head out of the Tank and bellows his name. From the volume he evidently expects Reynir to be around the back, but ends up bellowing right into Reynir’s ear-drum.

“Sorry about that.” he pulls Reynir to his feet, then presses a pistol into his hand “Are you familiar with one of these?”

“What?” Reynir shouts, still deafened.

“Pistol! Do you know how to point this thing and kill stuff right?” says Mikkel loudly.

Glancing at the pistol in his hand, Reynir catches on and nods uncertainly “I do better with my shepherd’s staff, though. Why?” a horrible thought pops into his head. In a panic he flings the pistol over his shoulder and cries “You can’t make me shoot Tuuri!”

The pistol passes through Nanna-Elka’s head and earns him a derisive bark. Mikkel rolls his eyes.

“No, I can’t and I won’t. No one will be shooting Tuuri-”

A weak but stern cry comes from the Tank: “Damn straight!”

He stoops and retrieves the pistol, stepping into Nanna-Elka’s path as he does. She glowers and continues through his lower-legs “Since you seem to be determined to sit on the front step until one of them comes out of the woods, I’m going to ask you to do it with the gun.”

“I don’t need this.” he protests even as he accepts the weapon and tests its insidious weight in his palm “I have Nanna-Elka.”

A faint flicker of disbelief crosses Mikkel’s face, but he indulges Reynir “I’d feel better if you had this too. Pardon my blasphemy, but I think it’s better to rely on a corporeal gun with corporeal bullets than a…a spirit dog you’ve only just discovered.”

“Blasphemy.” repeats Nanna-Elka.

“Ok. Ok, I’ll hold onto it. Where are you going?”

Only now has Reynir noticed Mikkel has changed. Normally when in the Tank, Mikkel wears either his uniform stripped down to the undershirt and breeches, or one of the infinity of tasteful, cosy home-made sweaters he claims mass-produced during one appallingly long and boring winter in his twenties. In place of a sweater is a heavy-duty parka, the sort made to carry its wearer comfortably through a blizzard, and a pair of what Sigrun calls the ‘business breeches’, which are made of a significantly thicker and warmer material. These clothes they only don when expecting to be out of the Tank for an extended period of time and possibly for some of the frigid night.  
On top of that Mikkel has borrowed Emil’s satchel- the one Lalli had to patch with polka-dot patterned cloth after Emil used it as a make-shift cudgel on a troll. It’s bulging, with the sleeve of a second parka trailing from it like a tongue.

Mikkel does not reply. So, squaring his jaw, Reynir sticks the gun on his belt and hugs Mikkel tightly “Be safe!”

“Reynir,” Mikkel mutters squashed into his collarbone “Mind my ribs, please.”

After that, he is gone without much fanfare. Nanna-Elka pauses to watch him until he has disappeared into the tree-line, grunts, and returns to pacing. Reynir pulls the pistol from his belt and examines it from trigger to muzzle. The pistol is quite light compared to the rifles he is used to. Since joining the expedition via Carrot Express, Reynir has not had much cause to arm himself. How could he when Sigrun or Mikkel toss him head-first into the safety of the Tank at the first sign of trouble? The only time he has fired a gun, it was a shot from Lalli’s rifle at what he thought was a buck, but turned out to be a blond-barked tree doing a very good impression of a buck.  
He was so embarrassed to have wasted a bullet he promised himself he wouldn’t fire again unless a troll charged him. Even then he probably would not have the chance- he’d either be locked up in the Tank or sailing through the air to it if a troll was around to menace him.

“I’m sure I can still hit stuff.” Reynir mumbles.

“I sure hope so.” Tuuri has propped herself up in the doorway, swathed in a blanket “He really left?”

“Yeah.”

She closes her eyes and sighs raggedly “Shit. I thought he’d come to his senses. Turn around. Can you believe it? Leaving us again? You’re pretty much useless and I’m half-dead. What does he think he’s coming back to?”

Reynir bites down on his bottom lip. He is glad Tuuri’s eyes aren’t open to see the naked hurt on his face- he really has to learn to keep his heart somewhere other than his sleeve “I guess he’s worried they might be close. Somebody might be trapped in a snow-well. Sigrun might be really close, but she can’t get back on her own. The same with the other two.”

To his surprise, she laughs “Oh, ‘Nir, you’re so sweet. I wish I had your optimism.”

“Is it that hard to believe?” 

“For me? Yeah. I’ve been in a situation like this before. I know how these things go. They aren’t coming back.”

“How do you know?”

She opens her eyes to glazed slits and stares over his head, at the woods “You know I was born in Mikkeli, right?”

He nods. She has already hinted at what happened in Mikkeli- her family died out from under her, save for her brother and cousin. Reynir has his own vague impression of what happened at Mikkeli. Even he heard about it when it happened. The news of the unusual, spectacular tragedy spread so fast his parents didn’t have the time to shelter him from it.

“So was my brother. And Lalli’s brother.”

Reynir doesn’t register the last part “I know Onni was-”

“Not Onni. Ville. My baby brother Ville.” she worries a loose thread between her fingers “And Hannu. Hannu was the older twin. He came out at twilight. Lalli waited until after midnight, so technically they were born on different days. But Lalli always used Hannu’s birthday as his too. He still does it. Says he’s a Vappu baby, when really he was born the day after.”

Nanna-Elka has come to a stop. She watches Tuuri the way one might watch a person with a knife in their hands with an unclear intention.

“Hannu‘n’Lalli were two months older than Ville. Hannu thought that made him a god. Two months, two hours- he was older, so he was stronger and smarter and they had to listen to his commands. He told them to stay put when it started. He stuck Lalli and Ville under a table in the kitchen and said for them not to move until he came back. Mikkel is eleven and a half years older than you, ten than me. He puts us in the Tank and tells us not to move. Hannu didn’t come back. Maybe Mikkel will, but it won’t matter in the end, ‘cos the others aren’t coming back and he’ll die without them around, just like we will. So I guess I don’t really want your optimism, Reynir, I want your naiveite.”

With that, she swivels and limps into the depths of the gloom inside the Tank. Reynir is left outside to hold vigil with his unfamiliar pistol and his growling dog. 

“Fuck off.” he mumbles under his breath.

 

 

Death begins with a golden stag. A great horned thing the colour of the summer sun at noon, and it has folded itself up around Emil like a doe huddling with its faun. Emil becomes aware of this with a sickening jolt. His stomach flips. Instinctively, he clenches his fists and tries to reach for the dagger Sigrun makes him take everywhere but cannot reach it for the stag’s neck rests across his shoulder and he will surely notice if Emil moves.  
Faintly, Emil wonders if deer have ever been known to eat people. Stags can certainly be jerks during the mating seasons. Hopped up on hormones and other manly juices, once they run out of rivals among their own species they will sometimes go after any human they deem a threat to their herd. Early in his Cleanser training, Emil watched his commanding officer get chased up a tree by a massive buck with a bad attitude and enormous horns, who had to be lured away from his quarry with a carrot on a stick. 

While the stag trotted gamely after the hovering carrot his commanding officer climbed from the tree, pointed unashamedly at her wet crotch and said “If you get charged by a stag and this isn’t your immediate reaction, assume you’re dead already.”

Dead- sounds like a bell in his mind. Is he dead? Does this stag think it’s cuddling a corpse? Or is Emil actually a corpse and he has yet to realise it? His chest is obscured by the heavy chin of the stag resting there, its soft breath tickling Emil’s neck. He can no more tell if he is bleeding than he can heave the massive weight of the stag off.  
What if a soul can get trapped in a dead body? What if Emil is stuck here until he rots away or is stripped by the predators of- where is he? Not in the forest anymore. Emil is fairly sure he and Lalli were still in the woods when he was last conscious. He couldn’t tell what was going on around them. They might well have walked straight into the centre of a bustling civilisation and Emil would not have known it from the silent, sick woods he has grown used to. And where did this big bloody stag come from? Why in the name of Reynir’s gods has it decided to make a pillow of Emil, who might be at this very moment a corpse with a nougat filling of soul.

“Lalli?” that comes out squeakier than he intended. He is brought to the verge of tears of joy when he finds he can move. Wriggling in a fruitless attempt to free himself, Emil manages to roll onto his side just a bit, but stops when the stag’s head lolls to the side and bonks him on the crown with the flat of an antler. Another inch to the left and he might have been gored. 

Emil can’t see much from underneath the stag. Just that landscape has changed from solemn trees and thick snow to a rocky crags and a mist like watery gravy. Above him is a heavy blackness. The night sky, peppered with stars, seems to be sagging inwards on its own weight. 

He tries again: “Lalli?”

The stag stirs a little, causing Emil’s heart to leap into his throat. He lets out another squeak, an involuntary, embarrassing squeak of fear he hopes Lalli is not present to hear. He is not. Unfortunately for Emil the stag is and has evidently been disturbed enough by the noises and jittery movements Emil has made since waking up that it can no longer sleep on. An eye of bright black slides open and peers into Emil’s face. Fringed with thick eyelashes, the effect is of a puddle of pure darkness, perhaps a hole bored into the very skull of the animal.

Emil panics “Don’t eat me!”

Amazingly, the deer responds. The voice is very human. The words are as clear as day “I’m not going to eat you. I’m a herbivore.”

Rather than the comforting effect the deer probably intends, this has the effect of sending Emil into a fresh panic. He pummels the stag in the head with surprising strength. To dodge his knuckles the stag must lift its heavy head, and as soon as the chin that anchored him there is gone, so is Emil. He spares a quick look down at himself and gathers there is no blood whatsoever- and these are not his clothes, either.

“I’ve been stripped and changed!” he cries out in agony. Somebody touched him without permission! Somebody took off his bloody things and stuck him in a blue tunic and black breeches that look like they were ripped straight out of the Viking era.

Meanwhile the stag scrambles to its hooves and calls out after him “Wait! I’m not going to hurt you!”

Emil gives a response appropriate for a man who has been wrenched from death’s door in the middle of a forest to a strange, deserted barren slope without a speck of blood on him without explanation: “Fuck off!”

While he does not expect to be able to out-run a stag, no matter how much of a boost the sharp sting of adrenaline gives him, he at least expects to make it to the top of the slope before the beast is upon him. From there it’s a choice between a swan-dive into whatever is up there or trying to throw the stag over the side, which is about as implausible a task as has ever popped into Emil’s head. 

“Emil! Stop!”

The shock of hearing his own name brings him to a screeching halt. For one glorious moment he thinks Lalli has materialised in that helpful, creepy way of his and is here to save the day. But his name came from the stag’s muzzle- the stag who is only a metre behind him. Now that Emil faces it head-on he sees the stag is not exactly an ordinary specimen. The average stag can expect to grow to a modest height of two or so metres excluding the horns, but this one is more like four metres, and another two taking the horns into account. Emil may not have seen very many stags’ antlers in a full splendour before, but he knows that antlers which branch normally then taper to spear-sharp tips is not right. Those are weapons on that animal’s head, not tools for a mating display.

His legs turn to water beneath him. He stays steady, though, thinking of what Sigrun would say to a stag that called her name “Well?”

The stag blinks in a very human gesture of surprise. Obviously it thought he was going to make a break for it again, after seeing its full size “Well what?”

“Explain yourself. You’re a giant talking golden deer with freaky horns and you were cuddling me and I demand an explanation!”  
Surely that isn’t him speaking? That commanding, indignant voice? Sigrun must have rubbed off on him- trained him, really- more thoroughly than he thought.

“Look inside yourself. You already know the truth-”

“Nope!” Emil seizes the rough hem of his tunic and tugs the front smooth “Nope, nope, I was wounded to the point of probable death, and now I’m in fresh clothes with no blood, and I want to hear an explanation right now! I’m not going to play around with you, dammit!”

“Gods,” breathes the stag “Calm down.”

Emil grows shrill now- this is better, this is what he expects from himself “No! Fuck you! And fuck your stupid antlers! What, you think you can cuddle me without my permission and call my name and make some existentially threatening statement and I’ll play along like a docile sheep? Do I look like a fucking sheep to you? Because I’ve never seen a blond sheep before!”

“Bet you never seen a blond stag before either.” counters the stag.

“You ever seen an accomplished drama queen throw a tantrum? Because I am a drama queen. I’m the empress of drama queens. I graduated from the Drama Queens’ Academic Academy of Tantrums with honours. You think this is bad, you’re gonna be on all four knees weeping for me to go back to this when I really throw down! And I will- I promise you I’ll throw the greatest tantrum this world has ever seen if you don’t GIVE ME A STRAIGHT ANSWER RIGHT NOW YOU GIGANTIC HORNED LEMON!”

In the silence that follows, the stag at an absolute loss for words, Emil panting from effort, another noise rushes in to fill the quiet. The half-articulate hubbub of a large crowd. The sound of a swift wind in a winter canopy. The drip of an icicle melting slowly outside a bedroom window. All of these, together and melded and distinct, and absolutely hair-raising to listen to.  
Slowly, Emil turns to look over his shoulder. From the top of the slope, he sees a place not meant for mortal eyes.

Beneath him rolls out a vast and craggy valley, rimmed by needle-like spires of rock with occasional gaps and landings such as the steep slope Emil has just crested, and squatting within the valley are ramshackle houses of stone and wood glued together in a mortar of black mud, a town, he thinks, or a small city composed entirely of these ugly shanties as far as he can see, with narrow streets populated by unspeakable creatures. Among many, the resemblance to humanity is passing. Others look like approximations of humanity carved by a crude, untalented hand. A scattering are wholly formed humans, but even from the distance Emil can see they are all stunted by pain or hunched by an injury or so, so pale they seem to be translucent. Emil can see people of every colour and variation the human race has to offer- probably more, in fact, than it currently can. There are traditional dresses he does recognises like the salwar kameez and the boubou and the gátki, some he has only seen in pictures like the kimono and the hanbok, and others still he cannot begin to identify. The crude things wear these too- clothes flap from thin and bent frames, dragging in the dirt from those who crawl. The impossible things, the things which ooze grey pus and possess no discernible features other than limbs that are in the process of being consumed by some kind of strange blister that obscures most of the body, they have only rags caught in the glue of their festering wounds to hint they were ever dressed.

Every sixth or seventh of the pale people is accompanied by an animal. This ranges from a grizzly bear that looks as sickly as the kimono-clad woman it limps after, to a bright buzz around the head of a mostly naked man with copper-coloured skin that Emil takes to be a hummingbird. Every now and then a stunted person struggles down the streets in the company of warped animals, of seals with no flippers and dogs with more teeth than their heads can hold. Emil does not even want to guess at what the black clouds of ash sliming or hovering behind the oozing things might once have been.

For a long time, he can only stare. When the stag trots tentatively to his side he does not react. When the stag stoops and presses its warm muzzle to Emil’s head, he leans into the stag and wraps an arm around its neck.

“Don’t be afraid.” says the stag.

“Why not?” he rasps “I died. Obviously, I died.”

“No, not yet. We’re still alive.”

“We?” 

“You and I.”

A childhood memory comes to him unbidden; Emil prefers not to touch any of the memories of his life before he turned fourteen and moved to Mora, but this one is one of the few pure made before then. An imaginary friend he used to babble to. An imaginary friend that seemed so real and distinct from him in retrospect he has sometimes wondered if he did not have a latent case of D.I.D his childhood had briefly aggravated. 

“Do you see the largest of the houses? That one on the outskirts. The one made of bone.”

Emil looks at the stag- at her “Ansgara, is that you?”

The stag, or the doe with antlers, meets his eyes warmly “Of course.”

“I made you up. When I was little.”

“No you didn’t. Children often know their fylgja or luonto when they’re too young to know better. Besides, what little boy knows a sophisticated name like Ansgara? What little boy would name his imaginary friend something like that on his own?”

“Why do you have horns? You’re a girl, right?”

“Because I can, and I what else am I going to use to gore things? Tusks?”

The hideous city and its miserable occupants are briefly forgotten as Emil throws his arms around the stag’s neck and hugs her fiercely. Ansgara swipes her soft tongue across his forehead and straightens, lifting him from the ground. After a clumsy jostle Emil straightens up on her back and stares out at the city again.

“Is this death?”

“This is Helheim.” says Ansgara “So, something like death, but not quite. Those people down there are death. We are not, though. We are a pearl.”

Emil has no idea what that means and cannot drum up the courage to ask “And Lalli?”

“With our body.”

“So…so we’re not dead yet. How do we know if that happens?”

“Look at your skin and my fur.”  
Both exude what seems to be a veritable glow of health, compared to their dingy surroundings.

“Let me guess- if my skin gets pale and your fur too, then we know we’re dead?”

“We’ll know we’re dead when you can see through your hand and I can see through my hooves. If we don’t want that to happen, then we need to get to that house of bone I tried to point out earlier.”

Glancing between the pallid house and his solid hand, Emil steadies himself with a deep breath. Lalli is with his body. So he should be safe. If there is a way to heal him, Lalli will find it. Sigrun must be active too, still on her feet, still taking on the world one troll and a time. She will undoubtedly find Lalli soon, and then it is only a matter of time until they have returned to the Tank. Tuuri will be desperately sick by then. The cure sat in Emil’s pocket, unscathed by the claws that parted his ribcage the last time he checked, so if they can just make it to Tuuri, there is still a chance for her.  
Emil does not know how much time he has. Not much, though, of that he is sure.

“Let’s go, then.” he winds an arm around Ansgara’s broad neck “To Helheim.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I consulted my notes to figure out why I had given a female deer a full set of antlers, I found 'aesthetic' circled in three different high-lighters.
> 
> Also, yay for flimsy title justification! I'll explain that whole 'pearl' dealie in later chapters


	5. Sigrun falls apart (and comes together again)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore warning. Lots and lots of gore.

In spite of Sigrun’s admirable conviction to seek out a satisfactorily violent death with her last vestiges of strength she does not, in fact, make it more than three metres from the hollow in the roots before it becomes apparent she is not going anywhere. 

It is an odd quirk of the human body that affords the meat a will of its own. Sometimes, in situations of extreme pain or mental pressure, the body occasionally exercises this small independence to betray the mind that occupies it. This can arise for any number of reasons; to shut out a traumatic injury or a memory, or to prevent the stubborn mind to cause its meat further injury. While Sigrun’s mind buzzes of rage and fear at her apparent fate, her body arrives at the conclusion that she will not stop punishing herself unless she is forced to, and takes measures to prolong whatever short amount of life is left to her.  
Her legs take it upon themselves to save her by giving out thoroughly and unexpectedly, dropping her in the snow like a lead weight. She looks back at her legs in confusion and tries to stand. The command just will not reach the muscles, or if it does, the muscles ignore them. For a moment she is sure she is paralysed from the waist below- not taking into account the fact that she can still kneel- until the briefest of wiggles in her toes dispels this fear. She can move her toes and clench a couple of muscles independently, but her legs simply refuse to work cohesively. 

Sigrun curses bitterly and pounds a fist into the snow. She bows and touches her forehead to the ground. The casual observer might mistake her sudden slump for death catching up to her all at once lie a blunt blow to the back of the head. 

“Ok, ok. This obviously isn’t gonna work.” she mumbles into her patella. Her mind, she thinks, has begun to play tricks too. A black smear has appeared to hover in the corner of her blurred vision. It is almost human. It is just human enough to make Sigrun look twice, and grow uneasy when the shape persists as she swivels and stares. Like a shadow severed from its body.  
Her brain must be ready to pour out of her ears at this point; absolutely boiled by the infection.

Unlike her confused mind, this is not the first time her legs have failed her. Delayed shock did it once, and before that an ankle twisted badly between rotting floorboards made it so that she couldn’t move without gritting her teeth against pain for two weeks. Uncle U-P had to carry her back to the base-camp on the first occasion and on the second she was humiliated by a personal secretary of sorts, a soldier assigned by her father, who followed her around carrying her things so she could use the crutch properly.

She is alone this time. Alone with the realisation of what a horrible thing it is to have the body quit on you, when you need it the most, and the even less comforting notion her legs’ failure now might be the start of her entire body giving up. Muscle by muscle. Limb by limb. Then the cold will claim her before the fever, because she will not be able to make a fire before the night falls.  
Sigrun makes her way back to the root-cave. Hauling herself hand-over-hand, reaching back once to unsnag her ankle from a rock. By the time she reaches the cave and struggles into the most comfortable position she can find, she knows she has exhausted herself. The last bit of real energy she has, she used to get into the roots. This is it. No way to build a fire- simply no means to get herself out there even to collect tinder. 

Sigrun is going to freeze to death. Perhaps in a matter of hours, perhaps in a half hour. 

She is going to die at the mouth of a little hollow underneath a tree. The next snowfall will bury whatever of her remains the animals leave, and that is it. That is the end of Sigrun Eide. No amount of investigation or rescue search future generations might undertake will discover her- not that she has done enough, been enough of a person to merit the interest of the people who will ford into the Silence.   
Gods, she was going to be a part of that. Sigrun had plans to lead a few more expeditions like this. Not for a span of months like this one. Short forays and quick Cleansing projects that made a small area safe to build the most compact of military outposts. Maybe one day she would fight in a more successful version of Kastrup. Maybe one day she would settle in a newly Cleansed area and have children who knew nothing but the mountains their mother had made safe. 

Sigrun is disgusted to find she has begun to cry. 

Without her permission or awareness, Sigrun’s fingers begin to trace out tiny patterns in the snow. Intricate as snowflakes, the patterns are drawn clumsily but steadily with the reddened tips of her bare fingers.   
She finally notices her fingers moving of their own accord (Did she take off her gloves? When did she do that?) they remind her of the hands of a pair of sisters she used to know in her training. One was a senior officer, the other a petty soldier. They were named Archarya and used to come to training in the summer with the tips of their fingers dyed red from hennas. Sigrun has no idea what the significance of the patterns they drew on themselves might have been or what they looked like at all, as she never saw much more than those little stains when one of the sisters removed her gloves for a tricky task. But she knows what these patterns emerging underneath her fingers are. The shapes of these runes she has come to know and respect.

The day after the catastrophic battle, she found Reynir and Lalli with a bucket of paint and a brush between them, looking at a massive rune Reynir had apparently done up on the back of the Tank at Lalli’s request. Sigrun was not about to argue with the group’s only experienced mage, no matter how angry she was that day. If Lalli thought the rune should go up then up the rune would go. And up went the runes until the Tank looked like the victim of an insane graffiti artist with a passion for Ancient Norse scripts.   
It was an exercise in patience. Her immediate instinct was, of course, to cuff them both for painting all over the Tank. Tuuri got nervous and asked several times if the runes were meant to ward off the trolls, or keep her inside the Tank. Emil had no idea what they were and treated them the way most normal people treat an open flame. Mikkel did not mention the stuff at all. He had begun to retreat in on himself in the days following the battle. Sigrun wonders, faintly, if he will take up the mantle of protector and leader now that she can do it no longer. Or maybe he’ll lay down in the snow tonight and let it freeze him too. 

Reynir noticed Sigrun staring at the runes. In his typical innocent manner he interpreted this as genuine interest took it upon himself to explained a few of them.  
He gathered the necessary words from Mikkel and repeated them back to Sigrun, pointing to each of the relevant runes as he said them. If she did not understand which one he meant he would take her good hand and put the palm over the rune, repeating the word emphatically.

Sigrun stares at the rune she has traced out in the snow, another part of her staring into Reynir’s grass-green eyes and hearing him say “Ægishjálmur. For awe.” and the one beside it: “Skelkunarstafur. For the enemy’s fear. Tóustefna…for foxes, but on ghosts too, I hope.”  
They fell about laughing at that; Sigrun laughs weakly now, wishing Reynir were here. He could make better runes. Hers are spindly and confused, like the legs of a flattened spider.

A chill up her spine compels her to look up. The severed shadow is now just a little beyond the mouth of her cave. If she stretched out her hand, she could grasp at the wispy hem of it.  
“Are you a fox or a ghost?” she points at the tóustefna “Either way you can’t come near me.”

She notices a few more shadows have collected around the first. These shadows are far less easy on the eyes; lumpy and distended, and one even looks crispy and solid around the edges, like a shed snakeskin.   
The runes start to pour out of her. She strips of the other glove, tossing all concerns for the chill in her bones to the wind, and draws different runes with each hand. The ones produced by her bad hand are awkward and stilted, but functional, she knows. Somehow she knows.

A host of the shadows- the ghosts- gather around the mouth of her cave. Sigrun bites her bottom lip and snaps a twig from the roof to draw the runes with better detail. Then this is not enough; she bites into the ball of each forefinger and uses her own blood to sketch the runes on the surface of her skin. But she does not have enough skin out, so off goes her jacket and her undershirt, until she lays there in just her trousers and the wrap of bandages she uses for a bra when the two she brought along with her are in the wash. She kicks off her shoes and socks too. The more skin she can pattern, the better. 

The rune on her chest seems to grow hot as she works. The heat grows painful. She considers tearing it off her chest, yet she knows to do this would be foolish, because now that scorching heat has stopped radiating across her skin and is inside her, burning her hidden flesh and blood and the arm most of all, the arm that has been trying to fester off her body for what seems like her entire life. She cannot feel her arm for the burn. The only way she can be sure it is there at all is because the fingers of that hand are still sketching away on her body.  
She bites the heel of her hand for more blood. The runes are by now strange abbreviations that have no real right to work without the proper shape or ritual, but will work because Sigrun demands it of them, because Sigrun will allow no less of the runes or of herself.

“Pray.”   
The silvery thing has returned. A sable spun from moonlight emerges from the back of the cave. They stop at her knee and urge her on “Pray now. The gods are listening.”

Sigrun’s lips pull back over her teeth “Then let them watch too.”

Her strength has come back to her. She seizes roots at the mouth of the cave and pulls herself out in one swift motion, rolling through the runes in the snow. Sigrun rolls up onto her bare feet and has to catch herself on the trunk. The ghosts recoil like startled birds. Some of them hiss with the voices of dry winds and boiling kettles. Sigrun snarls back. She feints forwards and the ghosts fly backwards in all directions. A handful flee entirely and melt into the falling darkness. Those that remain circle her warily and whisper alien words of fear amongst themselves.

The sable’s claws are a phantom itch along her calf and arm, settling on her shoulder. The sable speaks into her ear “Pray, woman! Show your respect for the gods.”

“If they demand respect of me then I demand a reason to give it!” she turns her face to the sky, not caring that she has begun to cry again “Why should I love gods who abandon the people that cherish them?” 

Sigrun lashes out blindly. To her surprise and revulsion, her hand passes through a ghost. The sensation is not unlike plunging her fist into rotted flesh- a feeling she knows unfortunately well. Her hand is also gloved in a blueish energy, wherever she drew the runes. The blue stuff begins to leak out of her all at once. A tap has opened inside her and all this vitality and strength and fury she never knew she had has come out at once.   
Oddly enough it reminds her of her first period. The deep, disconcerting pain from within. The sudden out-pouring of stuff that she never knew her body contained. No way to stop it, no way to control it. She could only accept the pain and the blood and ride it out to the end.

But menstrual blood and detritus cannot be weaponised. This blue energy spilling out of her is most certainly meant for offense. The ghosts howl in terror, the stricken one shuddering from the blow. Its companions quickly leave it behind as they follow the first that fled into the darkness of the woods. Sigrun makes another swipe for the injured ghost, but it gets away from her just in time and slithers back into the shadows that birthed it. Shoulder-sable bobs up and down as Sigrun throws her arms up and roars, with an expression of resignation on its narrow face. 

Sigrun’s arms fall to her sides. She stands there, panting, unsure of what comes next. She has never been more aware of her life. So close did it come to ending. So strange is it now, in beams of furious blue that leak around blood sigils. 

“Hey,” she breathes “Shoulder sable.”

“My name is Marit.”

“Of course it is. Marit, am I a mage or something?”

“Looks that way.” Marit rasps her tongue over Sigrun’s forehead “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Before the news can sink in, another danger makes itself known.

Sigrun has gotten away with a bit of blaspheming in her time. She has been mad at her gods before and shaken her fist at the sky, hurling dirty names and curses against their mothers. But all with a spirit of real love in her heart, of course, which the gods know well. They expect a bit of potty-mouthing from their followers every now and again. The best Vikings need swear-words to process their deeper emotions.   
What she has said to Marit, however, is evidently a step too far. 

Out of the woods lumbers a great gold bear. The trunks scrape against its flanks and stretch out of its way. The lowest of the branches spring off its head and back. A crushing jaw hangs open and funnels steam into the cold air. The same steam rises from Sigrun’s skin.

“Oh fuck.” says Marit “You made him mad. HIM! Of all the ones you could have pissed off!”

For a moment the bear and the woman contemplate each other. Now that it is out from under the trees, the bear has the space to stand. And it does. It rises and rises and rises until its head blots the sun to a bloody halo behind its enormous head. The bear lets out a deafening roar. Sigrun claps her hands over her ears. Marit digs her claws into her shoulder- what was the bad shoulder- and sways in terror.  
The roar echoes for kilometres and kilometres.

In a cold hall very, very far away from Sigrun’s stand-off, Näkki glares at Lalli “Was that your stomach?”

Sigrun draws in a deep breath. The bear’s black eyes shine in the rising moon. And she roars back. The bellow comes from the deepest pit of her belly and erupts out of her in the way a pyroclastic cloud shoots out of a volcano. The bear actually retreats a few steps, blown back by the force and the fury pouring out of Sigrun’s lungs. Marit decides to cut her losses and join in with her shrill marten’s shriek. It is a scream to make a Valkyrie weep with envy

As one Sigrun and Marit fall silent. Her chest heaves. Marit’s claws extend fully and prick Sigrun’s bruised flesh. The bear drops to all fours and charges Sigrun.

There is no chance of dodging so Sigrun goes limp in every muscle just as the bear ploughs into her. Hundreds of kilograms bowl her over, shatter her right shoulder and three ribs, gouging her left thigh open. Sigrun can only grunt with the pain. Marit lets out a strangled growl and scrabbles at the bear’s side uselessly. Blood fills her mouth. But she barely feels it. 

Sigrun finds herself on her stomach. Propping herself on her elbows she spits a clot of blood and tries to stand. Her thigh spits blood in protest. The shattered arm suddenly goes dead and useless. But she stands anyway. Just one arm to push herself up. What was the bad one. She does it anyway.

While she rolled across the ground many splinters stuck into her flesh, both stone and wood. She fumbles up and down her arm until she finds the worst offender, a splinter the size of her big toe between her thumb and first finger, and plucks it out gingerly. The rune about her neck is still hot. Though the runes on her skin are mostly covered by fresh blood, blue light still glows from where they once were.  
The bear senses she will not survive another charge. It seems to want to play with its food a little longer, so now it approaches slowly, its head swinging from side to side. She heard from Uncle Trond once that bears prefer to eat their victims fresh. Still kicking, that is. They start with the buttocks because that is the softest cut on the human body.

“Come on then.” she gurgles, hefting the splinter “If you wanna eat me butt-first you’re damn well gonna earn it.”

“And thus were uttered the world’s most embarrassing last words.” adds Marit helpfully.

The bear headbutts Sigrun in the stomach. She slumps over its snout and head and jabs for the eyes, as Marit finally springs into action. She delivers savage nips to the softest parts of the bear’s face. Around the time the bear tilts its head and crunches down on Sigrun’s ribcage from the side, Sigrun finds its left eye and pops it like a juicy berry, and Marit’s unnaturally sharp spirit’s claws find a purchase in the bear’s throat. She pedals her feet rapidly. Flesh tears like paper. Sigrun lets out a strange sort of sigh she thinks might be the sound of her lungs deflating for good. The bear sways drunkenly from side to side. It is still wearing her about its neck when it collapses and leaves the world with a soft grunt.

So Sigrun is left to die on its broad shoulders. Parts of her which were never meant to see fresh air are cold and getting dusted with snow. Her fingers and toes are blue. There’s a red thing in the snow not far away; it looks like it could have fallen out of her. At last, the rune on her chest has grown cold.

“Sigrun.” whispers Marit “We did it.”

Sigrun manages a smile. She pushes herself up and stumbles back from the bear’s body and falls on her back. This time, she is done. She can feel it.

Through a thick wheeze, Sigrun says “Emil…that Viking enough for you?”

Marit settles in the curve of Sigrun’s destroyed belly. She has nothing else to say. Sigrun fixes her eyes on the red remains of the sun in the dusk sky and waits to die.

Then, for the second time, the sun is blotted out as a bloody halo about a great blond head.

“This is what comes of blaspheming against the gods when you’re wearing a holy symbol.” says Thor. His voice is exactly as Sigrun always imagined. Deep and quiet and rumbling; a storm coming over the mountains.

“She didn’t mean it.” Marit protests softly, hoping she is not heard at all.

“I did.” Sigrun’s eyes are wet for the third time that day “Wh-where? Were…were you?”

“I was watching and listening.” Thor stoops. He clasps her good hand in his. A puppy’s paw in a wolf’s.

The taste of her own lungs is surprisingly pleasant. Bacon-ish.“To m-my d…death.” 

“You earned that death, you foolish woman. Listen to your body when it tells you something is wrong. Your body is a gift to you from the gods.” he winds a strong arm about her back and hefts her out of the snow, cradling her “And you let pride destroy it. It’s a treasure to be human, you know. To sicken.”

“Ff-fuh-rom where you’re…lo-looking. It hurts.”  
Her head has fallen against his chest. There is a thunder in there. His heart. Marit coils herself up under Sigrun’s neck and trembles gently.

“It’s supposed to hurt.”

“I hate it.” she suddenly has the means to speak again. Her chest is whole. Her words come out in a stream “I hate being weak and breakable. I hate the bodies you made for us. I hate that some of us can never get sick and some of us can only ever think about when they’re going to get sick. You’re cruel. All of you are cruel.”

She beats a fist on Thor’s massive chest. She might as well have struck a stone. 

“Why are you here now? Where the fuck were you when Tuuri was getting sick? Where were you when her family died, when Lalli’s brother died? And when Emil’s dad was beating the shit out of him? Why did you send Mikkel to Kastrup? Why did you let Reynir leave his farm? Why did you let us come out into this forsaken Silence?”

Thor offers no defence. He gathers her up and embraces her. The bristles of a surprisingly tame beard scratch her scalp. Arms the size of oars encircle her back. She cries on a collarbone exactly the same shape as her father’s, and remembers a night long, long ago when she was still too young to hold a knife straight, how a mighty storm shook the roof so much that she feared it would cave in and rushed to her parent’s bedroom. Her father was only half-conscious as she crawled into bed between him and her mother, but he hugged her close anyway and mumbled that he loved her, and she would always be safe with him while a gale roared all around.

After a time, she has run dry of tears. Sigrun has never been able to cry very much to begin with. Drawing three times in one day on her well of tears is a recipe for quick exhaustion. She closes her itching eyes and lets herself breathe, feeling the warmth of the sable curled about her neck. When Thor releases her, she lets him go without complaint and is able to kneel upright on her own. She only opens her eyes when he comes back and has draped something about her shoulders.

“What is this?” she rubs a rough brown fur between her fingers.

“The skin of the bear you killed.” Thor crouches in front of her “It’s not golden anymore, unfortunately. It was only golden when it was imbued with my sacred presence. Just an ordinary grizzly bear now.”

Sigrun draws the folds of the skin about her. Whatever Thor did to the bear has cured its skin perfectly and shaped it into a cloak roughly her size. The head has become a hood. When she pulls it up, teeth rusty with her blood come down over her eyes like a visor. A couple of buttons have been fashioned from the claws so that she may close it about herself, and when she does, the fur is unspeakably warm in the way only an enchanted fur can be.

“Is this mine?”

Thor cocks an eyebrow “You think I stuck it on you to see if I liked the look of it? Of course it’s yours. It’s a trophy of battle, isn’t it?”

“I fucking love this thing.” says Marit from the depths of the hood “It’s so cosy.”

Thor reaches over and fishes her pendant out by the string “Wear this on the outside.”

Sigrun furrows her brow “You aren’t claiming me as, like, a concubine or something?”

He laughs so hard his face flushes the red of yew berries “No! What kind of respectable soldier finds a lover on the field of battle?”

“Uh, like all of them. Have you ever read an epic? War-brides and grooms all over the place! War is the great match-maker.”

He grasps her shoulder “I knew I was right to like you. You’ve got everything. Strength, courage and just enough wit to make yourself interesting. And enough intelligence to question us- me, even. A little more than I think was necessary, but that’s good. A healthy dose of scepticism makes an alert soldier.”

Sigrun is suddenly and fiercely irritated with the god. She wonders if she has pleased him enough to get away with punching him in the jaw. Patronising son of a bitch. And at the same time, she is aware of being warm and satisfied, the way she feels comfortably full after a modest meal. Sigrun does not like this disjunction inside her. She does not like that she cannot decide how to feel about a god she always paid special attention to, who felt as close to her heart as if he were inside her.   
Now he is here, crouched and grinning at having draped her in the fine fur of an animal he set on her. Her wounds are gone, but her hands still shake. Marit has tucked herself away because she cannot stop trembling either, in spite of what she said about the comfortable cloak. She is hiding. Should a soul really have to hide from the god that gave it strength?

Sigrun swallows with some difficulty “I guess this might be asking too much…I kinda fever-sweat my way through all my other clothes and tore the rest of them off. Can I get a change of clothes too?”

“Of course.” he reaches behind him and seems to produce a full set of clothes from the thin air. Everything from the unmentionables to sturdy boots. 

While she cannot reconcile the god she prayed to for thirty years with the man in front of her, Sigrun has no qualms about stripping off in front of him. Thor turns around anyway, before she can make an awkward joke about owning nothing he has never seen before. The cold is no bother to her as she discards the bandages and trousers and a pair of underpants that say ‘Monday’ across the butt. On goes the underwear, prompting a disturbing thought that Thor knows her cup size. Do all gods know cup-sizes? Or do the gods investigate these sorts of things when they take a special interest in mortals?   
On goes a pair of thick trousers with a lot of pockets. She explores one on an impulse and retrieves the dagger she lost in the first battle of the day. This discovery unnerves her. Has Thor been watching her all day long? Has he been agonising over what danger to save her from first, or did he always plan to challenge her with that bear?

The undershirt is a blue version of what the expedition’s uniform. The shade of blue matches the cloak she wears at home to roam the mountains- the one Uncle U-P says makes her into an over-grown bluebird. He’s been telling that joke for years. It developed into a title when she was nineteen: ‘the Bluebird of Murder’, which shrank into ‘Murderbird’. At age thirty Uncle U-P will still ruffle her hair fondly and refer to her as his ‘little Murderbird’ when he brags about her.

She pulls the undershirt over her head “Thor?”

“Yes.”

Hearing his voice when he is not in her sight is inexplicably creepy and comforting at the same time “Why did you give me magic? Was it the runes?”

“Me? I didn’t give you a thing. You did that yourself.”

A shiver climbs her spine. Sigrun kneels to pull on a pair of thick socks “Does that mean I’ve always been a mage?”

“Yep.” says Marit, still on her shoulders.

“Yes,” echoes Thor “You have always had magic. You would have discovered this much sooner, I think, if you were the sort of person with a lot of time on your hands. Reynir, the young woman you’re travelling with-”

“Woman?” repeats Sigrun.

“Woman. Reynir is a woman, isn’t she?”

“No. He’s a guy. He calls himself ‘he’.”

She can hear the frown in Thor’s voice “Hm. Well, Reynir was a girl the last time I looked. Granted that was over ten years ago…at any rate, if you were a more reflective person or a shepherdess like Reynir with nothing to do but think and stare at sheep, I’m sure you would have discovered your magic sooner. But you are a very physical person.”

“I guess.” 

“You are very much focussed on the fighting, the brawling side of being a soldier in Ragnarok. Physical strength is what matters the most to you.”

Sigrun thinks of Emil, the way he was the first time she laid eyes on him. He cowered even as he drew himself up to his full height and dared her to challenge him with haughty blue eyes. She smiles.

“Sure.” she laces up the boots and kicks her heels into place.

“The way you discovered your magic was in keeping with that. You were so determined to prove yourself to us that you tore your magic right out of yourself. Used it like a club.” Thor laughs “Your technique will improve with time. Thirty is not so old to start your training, after all.”

What did Emil say to her when he arrived during the fever? Surely, that was a figment of her imagination talking to her, but it spoke to her in his voice and what it said was very much what Emil would have said. He screamed. He spewed poison. He made her feel two inches tall and filled with sawdust. Little brat.   
When she turns around and tells Thor he can do the same, she is grinning. 

“I have questions.”

“And I have answers-”

“But no time to ask them!” Sigrun swings the bearskin around her shoulders and flips the hood up “Sorry, Lord Thor, I’m immensely grateful for the help, I really am, but I lost a pair of friends out here. I need to see if I can’t find them before the dawn gets here.”

“You’re exhausted, aren’t you?”

Sigrun nods cheerfully “Dead on my feet! Never stopped me before, though.” she pats Reynir’s rune “And I’ll have this to protect me, won’t I?”

“You will.” Thor sighs and folds one brawny arm across his chest “Your fylgja can track another familiar to her. She has been inactive most of her life, sure, but she knows the spirit of that skinny Finn you were with.”

Marit chips in “I mean, I have basically no idea what I’m doing, but hey, neither does Reynir and he’s getting along fine. I think we can figure it out. I’m getting Näkki-ish vibes over there.” she makes a vague gesture south with her tail.

“You’re sure you won’t take a night’s rest? You’ve scared away the ghosts from this place, I assure you.”

Sigrun squares her shoulders “No. I won’t. I don’t want to sleep. I want to find my friends. You won’t drop them into my lap, right? This kind of, uh, divine intervention is a one-time thing, right?”

Thor nods with an attempt at solemnity. Instead he gives the impression of a child who has suddenly discovered a trick he never knew a long-loved toy could perform “I’m afraid so.”

“Then I better sort my own shit out now, before it gets worse…I just wonder if you can tell me if they’re still alive. Lalli- the skinny Finn. And Emil. The blond guy. Shaped like a barrel. A cuddly barrel. Seen him?”

Thor’s eyes glitter “I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

She bites back harsh words, swallows them, and finds a smile for the god “Thank you for your help.”

Then Sigrun puts her back to him and strides into the trees. It is a long time before the burn of his eyes is gone from her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun the mage: the thoughts we have in the shower while trying to come up with interesting plots. The idea of our most best leader becoming a mighty, lightning-flinging mage (whose magic for some reason looks nothing like Reynir's) was too much for my feeble fan-girl's heart, I'm afraid. So there she is. I considered making her fylgja a fox at first, but went with a sable because their pinched little faces always look like they are either smiling or growling, like Sigrun.   
> So yeah, mage Sigrun. Magegrun?


	6. Reynir needs an adult

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't seem to decide what the hell I'm trying to do with the chapter titles. Excuse the long break between chapters and under-whelming result. All I can say is that university not only kicks my personal life's butt, but gets its foot stuck so far up my personal life's butt that it won't come out and university and my personal life have to go to the ER.

Apart from listening to his fylgja growl and Tuuri abusing her lungs in the bunkroom, Reynir doesn’t have much to do but stare at the pistol. Why would Mikkel put this thing in his hands? Most of the time Sigrun doesn’t even trust him to hold a knife. She once related through Mikkel that she was afraid Reynir might trip, if allowed to hold a knife, and perhaps cut his own throat open, or if not his, then Emil’s. And Reynir was happy to let her keep thinking of him as a hapless, helpless fluffy civilian.   
It kept him off the battle-fields. It tucked him into a safe warm space where he could beg the gods to keep him safe, while the others fought and Sigrun’s wound grew steadily worse and worse…

“A wolf isn’t so different from a troll. Don’t you think, Nanna-E?”

Nanna-Elka’s teeth are bared. She stopped pacing an hour ago, but has not stopped staring at the tree-line. Every time her ears pop up Reynir feels a pang of relief, each time sure that Mikkel is about to plough out of the woods with the other slung on his back the way Reynir used to carry injured sheep on his back, and each time he is disappointed by the whisper of a ghost’s wispy shape between the trunks.   
They have begun to gather. He has not seen the horse again. But he gets the feeling the horse will pay a visit soon. 

Her tail twitches nervously. The ghosts drifting up to the tree-line to stare is not sitting well with her “I don’t think.” 

“You mean…you don’t think that’s true, or you don’t think, like, you don’t have thoughts?”

She lets out a soft growl and nips his hand for daring to suggest she is brainless “I have thoughts!” 

Reynir whips away his hand, and frowns at the red pockmarks her teeth left “So you don’t think a wolf is like a troll? In that I can kill it. If I try hard enough.”

“No. You will die. Badly.”

“Oh. Um, ok. Do you think that from a lack of faith in our ability or because-”

“Because you will die.”

“Why, though? If we’re gonna avoid dying then I need to know why you think I’m gonna die.”

“Because.”

Reynir scowls at her “Is there a button or something I can press on you that’ll make you start making some damn sense? Or, you know, just not be such a stand-offish jerk anymore?”

“I am not jerk. You are. I am you.”

“Ok, you know what?” Reynir stands, eyeing a ghost that has come out of the tree-line “You stay right here on the steps. Growl at anything that moves. I’m gonna go carve some staves into those trees. It just occurred to me that Mikkel might get attacked by them when he tries to come back through with the others.”

Nanna-Elka’s tongue lolls out between her teeth “We will save him.”

“If you think I’m gonna heft Mikkel on my shoulders to run away from the ghosts then you’re just being silly. And difficult. There’s no way I can pick him up.”

“Drag him.”

“No! Gods, you’re terrible!”

“I am pragmatic.”

Reynir cocks an eyebrow “That’s a new word.”

Nanna-Elka yawns, her eyes smug “No knife.”

Only now that he has reached the tree-line does Reynir realise she is right. He has no instrument with which to carve out the staves. He needs something with a fine tip to properly scratch out his patterns for them to be effective. If even one limb of the stave is at the wrong angle or a character is misplaced, the rune could fail to work, and he wouldn’t know until the trolls and ghosts have fallen upon the Tank. He is already pushing his luck by putting up the staves without the proper ritual. One more mistake or misstep, intentional or not, could lose him the favour of the gods, and then where will they be without a mage to defend the Tank?  
Reynir scans the ground hoping for a suitably pointy rock. He finds a few pinecones and a bit of sharp rock that breaks against the tree-trunk the moment he presses it to the trunk.

“Well shit!” he throws his hands up “I can’t do a thing! I don’t even have a fucking knife! I’ve got to be the most useless stow-away in existence.”

“The hairiest.” adds Nanna-Elka. Suddenly her hackles are raised and her tail is erect.

A ghost rears up beside Reynir and breezes past him like a whispering draught. Nanna-Elka is up on her feet and barking fit to raise the dead. Reynir curses at the top of his lungs and makes for the doorway of the Tank. A scattering of staves remain in the snow, but he is not satisfied Tuuri will be safe until he has inserted his body between her and the ghost. Immaterial or no, the ghost can not possibly hope to out-pace Reynir on his long legs.   
He hurtles into the doorway braces himself in there with a snarl on his lips. Nanna-Elka rips the snow up under her paws, running back and forth in front of him. The burst of courage that took the ghost out of the trees is apparently gone, and it flees the direction it came.

Reynir’s breathing is laboured from his short sprint “Nanna-E, I need to kill a bunny.”

Half an hour later, Tuuri is drawn from the Tank by a mighty commotion of both human and animal noises. She comes to the front step swathed in a blanket, blinking blearily. The snow outside is as torn up as if an army has just marched through. Reynir has a pair of scissors stolen from Lalli’s sewing kit in one hand and a squirming furry thing in the other hand, and rolls about in the snow in fierce a struggle with the latter.

“I’m sorry!” his voice is thick with emotion “I don’t want you to die either but this is for the greater good!”

Tuuri returns to her spot in the bunkroom and tells herself she did not see anything.

After a time, Reynir triumphs. With Nanna-Elka’s help he caught a rabbit- perhaps the strongest rabbit in existence, having put up the kind of fight normally expected from a mean drunk being thrown out of a tavern- and slaughtered it. By no fault of his own, he is covered in blood. Reynir has killed many sheep in his time, but this is the first time he has ever killed a rabbit. He did not quite know how best to open up the body once he had it, so ended up squirting a lot of the precious blood on himself.

Reynir wipes a bit of gore out of his eye, thankful that none got in his mouth because of his mask “Ok, I’ve got blood. Sigrun said blood is best for making staves. I mean, I’ve never had to follow the traditional rites for getting a stave to work, right? Like, bleeding from my forehead and chanting and those other things. So it doesn’t matter that I’m not bleeding my own blood, right? Cos I’d die of infection if I did that.”

“Tuuri’s blood.” Nanna-Elka’s eyes are alive with either amusement or blood-lust, or a combination of the two. Her mouth has curled up in what might be her approximation of a smile.

What? No! No, you’re awful!  
Reynir seizes the rabbit by its large feet (Reynir will have bruises in the exact shape of these later) and finds a rock with a shallow indent, just deep enough to hold the blood he is about to spill. 

After the horror of the last few months, Reynir is surprised to find that any guilt he feels he should feel at killing a bunny and mutilating its corpse is muted. Is this desensitisation to violence? Or is this his compassion draining out of him? Why does it not stir a single hint of nausea when he draws the knife across the rabbit’s throat and holds the corpse upside-down, so that all the blood rushes upwards to the wound?  
Was he ever so cold inside when it was a sheep’s throat he cut? 

By looping a bit of the clothes-line around the rabbit’s big feet and suspending it between two propped-up sticks, Reynir can leave the blood to drain without him holding the corpse up. Cleaning off Lalli’s scissors in the snow, Reynir returns it to the sewing kit he pilfered and sends up a quick prayer that Lalli will never discover what he did with those scissors. Now that he thinks about it might have been better to simply blunt the scissor’s edge carving out the staves- or some other pointed instrument, for that matter. Surely there are a few spare knives laying around? Sigrun has told him (via Mikkel) he should never go anywhere without at least two knives on his person and four more stashed wherever he plans to sleep. Come to think of it he could have just killed the rabbit with the pistol and saved himself the trouble of getting kicked to a pulp! Where did he put that thing anyway?  
The fog of panic was too thick in his mind for clear thoughts until now. Oh well.

Forgetting his appearance, Reynir peeks into the bunk-room. Tuuri is a heap of blankets topped with a ghostly wisp of grey hair, her breathing more like ocean noises than anything organic.

“Tuuri?” he whispers. Suddenly he is sure she is already dead- in spite of her breathing.

The heap turns and her pale face rolls towards him “What?” she sounds congested “Are they back?”

“No, not yet. But they should come back soon! I’m sure of it!”

She closes her eyes “Good. When Hannu gets back, we need to talk.”

His heart skips a beat “Hannu?”

“Hannu. He’s been too mean to Lalli lately. Don’t you think?”

Reynir swallows on a dry throat “Tuuri…you told me Hannu was dead.”

“He and Lalli-cat never got along. Even as kids. Hannu is too angry.”

He crosses the room and lays a tentative hand against Tuuri’s forehead. Normal. She doesn’t have even the beginnings of a fever.

Tuuri bats his hand away “What are you doing? And why are you all bloody?”

“Oh, um…I was just doing a chore for Mikkel. So he doesn’t have to do it when he comes back, since he’ll be so busy helping the others. How do you feel?”

“My shoulder hurts.” pushing herself into a sitting position, Tuuri shrugs off some of the blankets and the sleeve over her shoulder, and points.   
From underneath the soiled bandage Mikkel put on her wound just before the other three left this morning, a web of dark veins stretches out. Like a river. Like some spindly, insidious insect stretching itself. From her covered shoulder to her clavicle, these black threads run and pulse under her skin. Even as he watches Reynir can see one of them slithering a little further down her clavicle, heading for her breast.

“How about I change the bandage for you? Let me just go wash my hands.”

Reynir has seen Mikkel do this many times. He has done it himself a few times- only for Emil, though, and that was for the time he caught himself on his own fishing line. It was only a small scratch up his shoulder-blade. All he had to do was clean it off with disinfectant (learning what “Son of a bear-fucking bitch!” sounded like in Swedish). Granted, a wound infected with the Rash is a different case, but the principle is the same.

He returns in a shirt borrowed from Sigrun’s clothes. Any infective materials he might splash on himself will bother her no more than a stew stain. To keep his hair out of the way, he scrapes it back into a severe pony that makes Tuuri laugh when she sees him.  
She slips her arm out of the sweater and offers the infected shoulder. While Reynir cleans and re-dresses the wound with shaking hands, Tuuri talks.

She talks without purpose or restraint. Her reality seems to change at random, going from the current, desolate reality to some alternate version where she seems to think they are all in Mora and her family are still alive.   
“The smell of the water won’t leave my head. Water smells of freshness and cool, I think, and sometimes salt or minerals. I prefer the clean water, though. There was a spring behind our house with the cleanest water I’ve ever seen. I think a god must have created it. Once I got a splinter and I put my finger under the spring, and the splinter was pulled out of the puckered little wound I had. Right out. It was so amazing I ran to show my mother, and she told me I should stay away from the spring. She said I could be washed away. I had no roots. I started to cry, because it was just so fucking unfair- ow! That stings!”

Reynir dabs a rag soaked with antiseptic along the raw ridge of her wound “Sorry! It’s burning because it’s working.”

Her eyes are glazed “Be more careful with me. I haven’t got roots. All the others do. It’s unfair, how Hannu’n’Lalli and my brothers got the magic. I didn’t get a bit of it that we don’t all have. I can whistle a bird out of a tree. I can make water boil. I can make cream come out smooth. But I can’t call out the moon or push rivers back or make a rock weep, can I? I’ll make a good house-keeper. A good decoration. Years from now, my future spouse will say ‘look at my wife. She can make cream come out smooth even though she never learned to make cream. Isn’t she amazing?’ and that will be it.”

“People need smooth cream.” Reynir wipes the cloth between two stitches, flinching as Tuuri flinches. He bites his lower lip so hard a bit of blood pools in the bottom of his mask.

“Hannu makes fun of me for it. He says I was a mistake. He says we should have all been boys, boys with our grandmother’s power, and I was a girl from another family that sneaked in to try to steal the magic, but they wouldn’t let me have it.”

“Hannu sounds like he has a mouth on him.”

Tuuri rolls her eyes. For a second Reynir is afraid she might be fainting, but when she scoffs too, he relaxes “A mouth like a steel trap. Once it’s got on you it doesn’t let go. He’s the meanest thing I ever met.”

“Not very much like Lalli, then?”

Her tone changes suddenly, and Tuuri is squarely situated in reality again. She blinks back a tear “Gods, no. Lalli never looks for trouble. Hannu ran head-first into it. Hannu sought it out. Banged its door down and insulted its mother. He was so angry. Why- why are we talking about Hannu?”

“Oh, um, you wanted to. You wanted to tell me about him.”

“I shouldn’t. We don’t talk about Mikkeli.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Tuuri narrows her eyes against the pain “If…if I tell you about Mikkeli, you can’t let on that you know about it. They’ll be so mad with me. Onni made us promise we were never going to talk about Mikkeli again after we buried Ville. He can’t think about it. Thinking about it makes him crazy.”

“I won’t tell Onni.”  
If he does manage to find Onni then the absolute last thing he is going to talk about is how Onni almost died when he was a teenager. He’ll more likely run screaming into his arms (possibly wings) and cry until he passes out, which he supposes would constitute to waking up in the corporeal world again.

“Tuuri?” he prompts, after she remains silent “I promise I won’t tell him.”

But she does not hear him. Her eyes are fixed on some distant point, her head titled down. She shivers slightly- not enough to give Reynir any trouble as he puts on the new bandage and threads Tuuri’s arm back through her sleeve, then presses her back into her cocoon of blankets.

“I’ll be outside. Just, um, call if you need me. I’ll be covering the trees in blood runes.”

Tuuri mumbles something in Finnish and turns her face to the wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: is Emil dead or what?


	7. Down in Helheim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that was an unexpected hiatus. University kicked my life in the gonads and kept on stomping.

When you are dead, as Emil discovers, there is not much more to do than be dead. 

There is very little he can do, really, but get up on the back offered to him by the stag, whose name is Ansgara, and hang on while she leans back on her hooves and slides down the slick cliffscape. In quick, short bursts, Ansgara skids down the mountainside. Rocks turn to ash in the wake of her hooves. Emil cannot tell if this is because the hooves are so powerful, or if the rocks are weak and brittle. Every time they approach a ledge or she feels her balance going, Ansgara quickly snaps to attention, often causing Emil to bump his nose on the back of her neck. He clings to her so tightly he is half-afraid he will strangle her.  
The other half of him is suddenly, perhaps rationally afraid that if he gets off her, or in some way is not touching a part of her, he will disappear the way the steam of breath melts into a cold morning. 

What makes it worse is that no one cares. Not one of the grey people beneath them is alarmed by the gigantic stag skidding down the walls of their valley. Nor do they seem to notice there is anything to be alarmed by at all. The pale people and the slinking things are all far too preoccupied with their own strange business to notice the guy on the stag coming towards them. 

He is afraid he might bite his tongue off if he speaks while they are moving, so waits until she has found a purchase for her hooves. They hang over the long fall beneath them. Emil gets a sickly twist of vertigo and covers his mouth “Ansgara.”

“Yeah?” she pants.

“Am I a mage?”

“No.”

Emil pushes his hair from his eyes “Then what am I?”

“A normal human, I’m afraid.”

“Do we all have animals like you?”

“Every one of you. Most of you don’t see us until after you’re dead, though.” Ansgara snorts and shakes her sweaty head, her antlers glinting in the sickly light “We’re like the appendix, you know? We used to be very important to daily function, back when the world was magic and magic was conducted without scepticism or shame or any of that.”

“Back when everybody was a mage?” he ventures.

“No, of course not! There was never a time when everyone was a mage. But there was a time when everyone could see magic, and do little bits of it themselves. Like the Finns nowadays. I’m a leftover from that time.”

Emil cocks an eyebrow “How do you know that?”

Her face is briefly troubled “I just do.”

“How come I don’t know it then?”

“You’re not conscious of everything you know.”

“And you’re starting to sound like a self-help book.” Plenty of which he has read over the past months, first out of a mild interest and later a sickening sense that he might be the worst person on the face of the planet.

The rest of the trip down goes in silence. Not wanting to look at the shanty, Emil turns his face to the sky. Or at least what this place passes off as a sky. More like a mimic of a sky, as made by someone who had only shadows and wan light to work with, then cast fog in the role of clouds. There is no moon. There is no sun. Where the light is coming from, he does not know or want to know. The grey belly of the sky rolls on for as far as he can see. He searches for the end of the shanty too, but cannot find it.   
Wherever the sky is, the shanty slouches beneath it save for this random cliff-face he and Ansgara turned up on. When he looks back the sheer face of it stretches on into the fog, interrupted every now and then by crumbling shelves like the one he had the fortune to end up on. Emil does not like to imagine what it would have been like if he appeared somewhere on the screes and had to roll all the way down. Suffice to say, it would have ruined his hair. 

Ansgara comes to a rocky halt at the edge of the shanty town and Emil thwacks his nose hard on the back of her head. Eyes watering, nose stinging, he rolls his shoulders back and tries to look as confident as he can. Regal, even. They have arrived at the mouth of an empty alley. Emil slumps against Ansgara. At the far end of the alley, the shadows of people pass back and forth.   
The sound of Ansgara’s hooves on the black cobblestones is the same sound the basement wall made when Emil tossed a stone against it. For a freezing instant he is back in the pitch black of the basement with the damp in his bones and his father’s footsteps pounding out a frantic pace overhead. The rock in his fingers always skitters back to his palm- the basement is so small there are few other places for it to go. And then it is gold fur knotted in his white fingers, and Emil swallows the lump that has formed in his throat. 

In the throat of the alley the building seem to lean over them. Emil looks up and sees the sky is just a jagged grey line between slope-shouldered walls and cracked windows. A pale pair of eyes meet his from the window of a topmost floor. A palm presses up against the dusty glass and swipes it clear. Seeing that he is looking at a child, Emil smiles out of habit. The child smiles back with gapped teeth and waves.  
Then the clammy sunlight hits him again. He throws up a hand against the glare, suddenly harsh, but sees through the slats of his fingers that they have found a populated street. Apparently it is not so unusual to have a guy on a gigantic deer emerge randomly out of an alleyway, because most of them spare Emil and Ansgara no more than a passing glance. No one seems offended by the look of wide-eyed terror on Emil’s face.

From afar, these people seemed waifish and strange. Only the worst among them were unbearable to look at. But as Emil’s eyes rove over this thin crowd of corpse-coloured people, people whose chins are streaked with long-dried blood, whose arms hang off at angles that can only be managed with a broken bone, he cannot find a safe place to rest his eyes. Each and every one of them wears the wound that was their death.  
Here, a woman with a sizeable bite taken from the right side of her face. She catches Emil staring and flashes him a timid smile, then lowers her head. There, a child hanging off the arm of someone Emil takes to be his father. They tussle in the doorway of one of the houses, the father tickling his son with torn hands, his son doubled up with laughter so that the hole in his back is bared to the street. A man ducks past Ansgara with a muttered apology for almost bumping into her. A timber wolf of the size of a small car accompanies him, serving as a kind of walking stick to make up for the man’s lack of a right leg. 

The pale stuff Emil took to be flesh is just mist. Mist, swaddled about a corpse and pressed so tight that it conformed to every contour- the nostrils, the eyes, the crow’s feet about the eyes- and even the clothes. It is only when they move the cloak stretches at the fibres and reveals the fresh blood and tissue underneath.  
Emil covers his mouth with one hand, and pushes his hair from his eyes with the other. Trembling and graceless, he dismounts, landing heavily on the cobblestones. His legs give way underneath him. He narrowly avoids barking his kneecaps on the ground by seizing a branch of Ansgara’s horns.

“Take a deep breath.” she mumbles.

“You take a deep breath.” he mumbles back.

But at last his training kicks in. Not the military training- the stuff Siv and Torbjörn taught him. Among coughing into his elbow and that he should always give up his seat for veterans and pregnant women, Siv hammered a certain survival instinct into him. People are always more willing to help someone in distress if they are polite, apologetic, even, for getting themselves into such a situation and daring to impose on others for help.

“Which is bull, of course,” she seems to be dressing either Hakan or Anna every time he casts back to his moment in his head “It’s not the victim’s fault for getting into trouble. Unless you were courting trouble or ignoring your responsibilities. If you’ve pissed off a bear and you’re asking to borrow somebody’s shotgun to scare it off, then that is an imposition. But otherwise? Just be polite and look as sweetly upset as you can and somebody will point you in the right direction.”

Emil glances to the left and the right. Either way he looks the view is pretty much the same: ramshackle places and an assortment of dead faces. Except to the left there is a small make-shift bridge in the road, where the cobblestones sag down into a shallow stream casually running through the street. A couple of boards are set up over the length. Emil watches a pre-teen girl and a bear cross the bridge, then heads for it too. He cannot think why or what he thinks might be in this direction. Only that there is a brave attempt at a bridge that looks mildly more civilised than the rest of what he has seen.  
Ansgara walks in stride with him. She seems to have caught on to where he wants to go though they have not spoken. Emil wonders if she can read his mind. If she can, then all she will be getting at the moment is a sort of low-pitched constant screaming, interspersed with coherent thoughts. 

The crowd absorbs them as if they had always been there. In spite of Emil’s best efforts not to look at anything but his boots, he catches two more people’s eyes. Each of them smile in the brisk manner of neighbours who are too busy to stop and converse. The second nods to him, a movement which makes her half-severed head bob dangerously about inside her wrap of mist-flesh. And each time, Emil scrounges up a wan smile in response. A part of him is proud of himself for not projectile vomiting into every face he happens to look at. The rest of him, which is the large majority, screams for him to do this- to have a screaming break down in the middle of the street. Anything to get the people to stop acting like it is perfectly normal to be dead and going about your business at the same time.  
But the reassuring crunch of Ansgara’s hooves keeps him going, as does her warm flank under his palm. 

As the bridge draws near he makes up a rule for himself. So long as he does not let go of Ansgara, nothing can hurt him. The boards groan briefly under Ansgara’s weight, and sag so that water spills onto the boards. Cold water passes over Emil’s foot. Even through the boot, it is absolutely freezing. He grits his teeth and springs the rest of the length of the bridge.

He hears a loud laugh “Cold, isn’t it?”

After a second of torturous debate, Emil looks to the woman who laughed at him and says abashed “Excuse me, ma’am. It took me by surprise.”

The woman is hard to look at, somehow. Other people passing by manage to be quite solid in spite of being made of mist that seems ready to give at any moment, but this woman wears her flesh like a curtain. He only has a vague idea of what she looks like from the impressions of her features on the grey stuff covering her. It does not help that she is quite tall and able to loom over him with a touch of menace, whether intentional or not.   
The thick material about her eyes gathers up, like she’s squinting.

Emil slings an arm over Ansgara’s flank. For some reason it is disconcerting to see the woman does not have an animal of her own.

“You’re very new, aren’t you?”

“Very.” repeats Emil. Should he admit he is not dead yet? And if he opens up on that particular topic of discussion, what if she dismisses it? What if she tells him he is dead- very very freshly dead?

“Do you have somewhere to go?”

“Ma’am?”

“Someone to go to,” she gestures down the street “To some family? An old flame, maybe? How old are you anyway?”

“Nineteen.”

“Twenty.” mutters Ansgara “February was last month.”

Emil corrects himself “Oh, um, twenty.”

“Hm. Good age. Good year to be stuck at anyway. You’re around the physical peak of youth and just emotionally stable enough that you’re in a good place to sort yourself out. If I had died when I was twenty I think I’d be in a much better place,” she leans in, taking on a conspiratorial tone “Of course if I had died when I was twenty I would have missed out on this place entirely and gotten jammed up in Walhalla with the rest of those poor souls. Anyway, good luck to you. Hopefully you’ll find some family soon.”  
With that, she glides off into the gloomy mouth of an alleyway.

Ansgara puts her muzzle to Emil’s shoulder and nudges him along “What do you think?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“About family,” she lets out something that sounds like a long-suffering sigh “Do you want to try?”

Emil scoffs “Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you want to.”

“I don’t want to. I mean, the only reason I’d ever want to find her is out of some self-punishing, morbid curiosity. And my grandparents…what’s the point of doing that? I’d just rather not.”

“Ok. What do you want to do instead?”

Emil shrugs “We’ll figure something out.”

 

After the river has done her work, there is little Lalli himself can do but ready himself for the coming task.

There is simply no way he can go immediately. Top out of the host of things preventing Lalli from an immediate rescue attempt is the fact that he spent the better part of a day supporting then carrying a fully grown man. A short man, granted, but Emil is also inexplicably dense. Persuading the river to help drained him to the dregs. Flinging Näkki like a rock at his enemies is definitely not the most efficient way to fight.   
Emil’s needs come first, though. As soon as he was sure Emil was breathing, he let the pastor lead him into the church, Emil once more in tow. It felt weird and wrong to enter a house of worship that had obviously been dead for so long, and even more so when Lalli saw the inside of it.

What he saw was probably exactly what the congregations before the Rash would have seen.

The pastor caught the look on his face and did the best to explain, as she guided him around the back of rows of polished pews “The river grew up here. My church has been here for some time, you see, long enough that I suppose she thinks of it as a sort of…of friend? A friendly sight at least. The river says she enjoyed the times when people worshipped here. I think we must have had walks or picnics or atom bombs on her banks. Atom bombs…those are things churches have on banks, right?”

“We’re pagan, ma’am. We worship where our gods live, in the trees and the water and the like. We don’t know anything about churches.” said Näkki apologetically.

Her face grew vaguely trouble “The river restored the church to how it was before we all got sick, and she and I have been the only ones here for…for a long time. I think it’s very pleasant here. I enjoy the peaceful atmosphere.”

She lead them into a room so plastered with shiny metal it made Lalli’s eyes hurt. Everywhere he looked, the countertops were cluttered with shiny appliances. The table was strewn with papers and books and a rectangular thing Lalli recognised from old photos as a laptop- supposedly the gateway to a demonic realm called the Internet. It gets too much to look, so Lalli put his head down and stayed quiet until the pastor opened another door and ushered them into a starkly furnished bedroom.

“I think someone must have slept here. Maybe me. Maybe the needy. I’m not certain. Anyway, all the amenities are still working,” she pointed out a closet-sized door “There’s the bathroom. There’s a chest of drawers with some clothes. The river comes in here sometimes and pretends to be human. She sits in the bathtub and wears jeans and things like that. Don’t mention it to her, though, she can be very sensitive about it.”

The pastor lead them vaguely towards the front of the church, where a polished pillar of wood stood, flattened at the top for something like a book to rest on. A weak sun stole through glass coloured like candy and flower petals. Tired-looking men in loincloths stooped. Women covered in what Lalli could only assume were bedsheets or a Christian version of the chador offered them loaves of bread or water. Lalli averted his eyes from the wan faces and watched Emil’s face instead, encouraged to see a touch of natural colour returning to his skin.

By the time the pastor had finally guided them across a plasticky floor made up to look like tiles and past a series of hard shiny surfaces, Lalli has had enough of the modern era. Something about the stark artificiality of it is stomach-churning, for a person who has spent the majority of his life drinking from lakes and sleeping up trees. The pastor shows him into a room with a low ceiling. Mercifully, there is a distinct lack of technology in here. The ensuite bathroom is nothing he is not used to. The bed is a narrow little thing, with a bed-side table and a lamp on that. Apart from that, nothing.  
Putting his back to the pastor, Lalli stretches Emil out on the plain grey bedspread, tucking the pillow under his head.

The pastor lingers uneasily in the doorway “Oh dear, I forgot we only had one bed.” 

“That’s fine. I prefer sleeping on the floor.” says Lalli shortly.

“Do you? How strange.”

“I’m used to it. Thank you, we should be fine now.”

The pastor hurries off, slamming the door on them. Her footsteps disappear rapidly into the depths of the church.  
Lalli lets out an enormous sigh and sinks to the floor.

Näkki settles down at Emil’s feet “I can’t believe we survived that.” 

“We’re not through it yet.”

Surprisingly, the shower works. Lalli stands under the stream of hot water until the run-off is no longer red, and uses a bar of soap to get the more stubborn stains off. He tries not to think about the fact that the soap pre-dates his entire family- that the only reason it exists is by some warping of nature and time by an over-grown water spirit. It’s entirely possibly the water running over his exposed skin is a part of her too. He definitely does not want to think about that.

Lalli closes his eyes and tries not to think of anything for a long time.


	8. Reynir fingerpaints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couple triggers here? Well leetle bit of gore, non-sexual nudity and Mikkel and Sigrun have exceptional potty-mouths

The question hung between them a long time before Sigrun asked it. And even then, she could only bring herself to do so under a watery moon while the kids were all sacked out in their beds. It was one of those things that did not bear discussing in the broad daylight where it would become real and potent and dangerous. Rather, it was a question made for the night so that it might be passed off as a dream when the sun came up and reality asserted itself once more.

Mikkel was already up. About fifteen minutes before Sigrun came out and joined him, he woke from one of the stock nightmares of Kastrup. There was blood. Fire. Scads of trolls. And Maja, half-dead in his arms. As usual, he dreamed silently. Whatever woke Sigrun up was of her own doing.   
She shuffled out in her sleeping clothes with a blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Mikkel knew from the start that she was on edge. Not in the way that the average person is on edge- not unnerved at all. When Sigrun is on edge, it means she is about to take some sort of decisive action. Though they had spent a lot of time in close quarters, Mikkel was still not sure whether or not Sigrun had the normal experience of fear, or if it was something to her like a mosquito was to the rest of the human race. 

Sigrun stepped past him on the front step and squatted a ways away from him. Already, Mikkel could tell she had the question in her mouth. She rolled it about, tasting it, deciding if she wanted to spit it out at last.  
Mikkel waited. He would have waited until the sun came up, had she given him the chance. Never moving. Holding his breath, perhaps, so that the air between them wasn’t thickened anymore by the steam.

At last, Sigrun yawned and said through it “So when are you gonna kill us?”

He let out a long breath he did not realise he was holding in “I won’t.”

“But you were going to.”

“But I was going to.”

Sigrun’s eyes were trained on the low rooves of a distant settlement. All of them were caved in. Corpses of trolls that had been too fat to move from the houses where they germinated slouched over the worst of the ruins. 

“With what?”

“They suggested I use my hands.” Mikkel glanced down at his hands, which were knotted at the hem of his sweater “Less expenditure of ammunition that way.”

Sigrun yawned again “And that’s how you do it? With your hands?”

“Most of the time.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“Six.”

“Six,” she repeated. Her face remained impassive “So you watched me fight trolls, with my bare hands sometimes, and you still thought ‘hey I can take this person’?”

“Honestly, Sigrun, I had decided I was just going to shoot you in the back and save myself the trouble.”

Sigrun let out a short bark of laughter “Good man! Take the easy way out when you can find it.”

A silence lapsed between them. In the back of the Tank, Mikkel heard the kids sleeping. Tuuri mumbled in Finnish while she slept. Reynir whimpered as something in his dreams frightened him. The occasional, kettle-like snore came out of one of them, but he was not sure which one.

“And have you killed young people before? Young like the boys.”

‘The boys’ always refers to Emil and Lalli. Reynir is always Reynir, and Tuuri is always Tuuri.   
“I don’t know. Back when I was their age I did kill a few people who could have been my age contemporaries. But I didn’t stop to ask them.”

“They don’t tell you that kind of stuff?”

“They only tell me what’s important to my mission.”

“’Mission’, huh?” Sigrun ground a knuckle into her eyes “That doesn’t suit you, Mikkel. Doing nasty shit for some anonymous assholes too lazy to do it themselves.”

Mikkel shrugged “I make it work.”

“Do you like it?”

“I hate it.”

“So why do you do it?”

“I don’t have a choice. I have…I have obligations. To my family. To other people. There are plenty of people who would suffer if I quit my job. And if I were to quit it would have to be with a bullet, you understand.”

Another silence. This one was longer. Mikkel closed his eyes and thought of his siblings. The mysterious snorer could so easily be one of them. Mette sounded a lot like that when she was breathing through a stuffed nose, and Michael, he sounded like that when he whistled.

Sigrun was the one to break the silence again “I’m not worried, you know. I know you won’t hurt us. Any one of us. I just don’t know what you’re going to do about that when we get back to the real world.”

With another sigh, Mikkel sagged back against the Tank and ran a hand through his hair “I’ll think of something, I’m sure.”

“It’s because we know about the cure. We know that it kills anyone who takes it. So…if something like it was ever used back home, we would know. We could figure it out. Especially because Em’s aunt works on the cure for a living. If she was handed something like this, and it started killing anyone who took it in trials, he could tell her anything she wanted to know. The people you work for- they want to use it?”

Mikkel nodded. But Sigrun was still not looking at him, so he said “Whenever there’s an outbreak. A premature inoculation of all the non-immune people who were around when it happened.”

“Whether they’re confirmed ill or not.”

“Yes. It goes a little deeper than that…inoculating the non-immune…then sending them into the front-lines of some cleansing efforts. Just small amounts. Just enough that…that they’re not going to put a dent in the population. That way, when they fall ill, they don’t survive to become what we’re trying to beat back.”

Sigrun gritted her teeth “And?”

“And what?”

“And, are you going to take it back?”

Mikkel ran a finger along the seam of his shirt, wishing the moon was just a bit brighter “No.”

Her shoulders slumped “What are you going to take back?”

“Nothing. I’ll say the cure was destroyed. Or fictional. Something the government invented in the last days of the Rash, to make it seem like they were curing the Rash with unfortunate side-effects, when they were really just injecting sick people with poisons. Something that would make them unusable to the people I work for.”

“They knew it was out here the whole time?” she guessed

Again, he caught himself nodding “They’re holding onto records from the years before the world was, well, the world. They know where all the potential cures for the Rash are. There were one or two cases before mine. One cure was just anti-freeze. Another was half-functional, but the active ingredient in it no longer exists because we don’t have the means to re-create it. I’ve done no better, I suppose. Still…. we’re bringing back some knowledge that might help us make the advancements we need.”

Sigrun shrugged “Good enough.”

“May I ask- how did you find out about me?”

At last she looked at him with an abashed grin “Some of it was my leaderly intuition. But mostly ‘cos I read that journal you’re keeping about the mission. I saw you hide it and you know I’m kind of a control-freak when it comes to teams in tiny spaces. I had to make sure you weren’t drawing your fantasies of murdering us all. And I’ll admit a tiny part of me thought you were hiding some vintage porn.”

Mikkel dropped his face into his hands “Good gods, woman.”

She laughed “I know, I know! I was thinking ‘where did he get it from, though? Did Emil sneak it in? Does Mikkel even like the same kind of stuff as Emil?’. I had a raging internal debate for, like, five minutes, then I said fuck it and there was the most secret-ey secrets of the Known World all scribbled down where I expected to find porn.”

“You must have been distraught.”

“ ‘Kel, it was like having my heart ripped out. You destroyed me.”

“Now I feel obliged to find you actual porn. Should I?”

Emil appeared at Mikkel’s side with a knife raised “Are you two really cackling about porn out here?”

There was an instant of tense and terrified silence, then Mikkel and Sigrun caught each other’s eyes and completely lost composure. Emil watched as the senior-most members of the mission doubled-up in the snow. He lowered the knife and crosses his arms “I thought you were in trouble! I thought something terrible was happening out here- because why else would two grown-ass soldiers be sitting outside in god-awful temperatures at stupid o’clock? But you’re really just laughing about porn?”

“Oh gods, Em, it’s not as bad as it sounds.” said Sigrun through a film of tears.

“It’s actually a hundred times worse.” wheezed Mikkel.

This sent them both off into fresh hysterics.

Emil stalked back towards the bunk-room “Just don’t start some weird relationship now. There’s only a month left on this mission, so if you’re really feeling so – so starved for carnal attention, go take it out on yourself somewhere the rest of us won’t be troubled by it!”

“I love that kid.” said Sigrun, when she gathered herself sufficiently for coherent speech.

“Emil’s a champion, alright.” he agreed “He’s going to go some amazing places, I’m sure.”

 

When the sun has at last sunk behind the horizon, Reynir shakes the last droplets of blood from his hands, steps back and contemplates his work. The tree-line is illuminated by the fire he set to keep the blood warm, which simmers gently in a pot strung up above the flames. His fingers are seared to the point that he can no longer feel them but the result is worth it.   
If someone happens along the scene who does not know Reynir or anything of Icelandic magic, they could not be blamed for thinking Reynir had murdered several dozen people and then wound down from his frenzy by doing a bit of crazed finger-painting. The strained sound of Tuuri’s breathing could be mistaken for the last of Reynir’s victims dying slowly in the back of the Tank, while the madman himself rocked on his heels and grinned at his work.

“I think these are much better than the one on the back of the Tank!” he exclaims to Nanna-E.

She grunts an affirmation. 

“And when we leave this place, I might just see if I can peel off a couple of these and maybe stick the bark up on the Tank somewhere.”

Another grunt.

“Mikkel will be fine! He knows to keep a light on, to keep the trolls off him. That should keep the ghosts off him too. Then when he hits the staves, he’ll be home free.”

The staves penetrate about a quarter of a kilometre into the tree-line. Reynir was reluctant to go any deeper for fear that another ghost might make a dash for Tuuri while he wasn’t looking, even though he put a second smaller fire directly in front of the steps. He figured with the paintwork on the body, the ghosts wouldn’t be able to get through anywhere but that door, which he plans to paint later on. From then on it was a matter of screwing up the courage to tromp into the whispering gloom. Nanna-E kept them all at bay with a variety of ferocious noises while Reynir worked, going to and from the simmering blood.  
It was slow, tedious, exhausting work, and above all, nerve-wracking. He felt Nanna-E’s own fear as she snapped at the things that reached for him, sometimes catching bits of them. Once she pulled down a whole ghost and pinned it with her paws. Somehow she was able to savage the thing’s immaterial form to pieces. Reynir felt the whole ordeal as he muttered a continuous stream of prayer and never once turned from his work. He felt the coldness of the ghost between his teeth. The solid yet incorporeal body beneath his hands. He felt himself blind with fury that this thing would dare try and touch him, the satisfaction of punishing its audacity with the rawness of his strength.

And now he feels disgusting and crusty. Looking down at himself, Reynir cannot help but gag. In the end they needed two rabbits to finish the job. The second one Nanna-E brought to him, swollen up with pride at having somehow rooted another one out although most of Denmark heard the struggle with the first and must have been cowering in their burrows because of it. While the blood of the second was collecting Reynir cleaned the corpse of the first and set it on a cooking fire. There’s some set aside for Tuuri, should she feel like eating when she stirs, and more for Mikkel when he comes back. 

“I need to get this off.” he plucks at the blood-thick collar of his borrowed top “Ah, shit, I ruined Sigrun’s sweater. I’ll have to knit her a new one…and she can just have a pair of my trousers. Holy Freyja, how did I get this much blood on me?”

Sigrun, he figures, will not need to eat tonight. Mikkel will probably find her tomorrow morning sharing a set with a confused-looking badger. She’ll be gorged on the wolf that attacked her in the dead of the night- whom she, of course, destroyed with her bare hands, and whose skin she has most likely fashioned into a cape.   
Emil and Lalli should be fine provided they’re still together. Lalli knows how to survive in a world designed to brutally murder mortal things. Emil knows how to burn stuff and that tends to serve him well. When they’re combined, each of them becomes just that little bit more confident. Reynir isn’t sure if it’s some kind of subtle rivalry or if they feel safer for knowing someone has their back. When he asked Mikkel what he thought of the two, Mikkel said he thought if the tension between them got any thicker one of them was going to choke.

Whatever that meant.

Reynir knocks the hot bloody bowls off the stand to steam in the snow and balances a pot water to boil in their place. Sick of the sensation of blood on his skin, Reynir starts to strip. He cannot pretend he is comfortable with the audience of hungry ghosts in the corner of his eye. Let them stare. The longer they stare at him, the more confident Reynir feels that he can make it through the night. Time spent staring is time spent not attacking. 

“Nanna-E, I was wondering,” he hauls the sweater over his head “Do you know everything I know?”

“We are brain. Not mind.” 

“So what do you know?”

The dog begins to turn about on top of a stone. When she has settled her head on her paws and trained her drowsy eyes on the woods, she answers “Importance. I know fields and lambing. And hunting. And month blood.”

“The what? Oh, my period? I haven’t had one of those for about two years.” this compels Reynir to glance down at his now bare thighs “I don’t think I even have a uterus anymore. I mean, the piping works, if you know what I mean.”

“Penis.” she surmises, making him laugh.

Reynir shrugs “Well it sure wasn’t comfy. I’m glad it’s gone. So if you know about that, what else do you know?”

Her eyes are like fogged-up windows, with only a suggestion of warmth and firelight in them “I know we are never cold.”

Reynir laughs “Yeah! I guessed you did, otherwise you’d be telling me not to get naked in the middle of a winter night. And then wet my head and everything.”

It is a peculiar trick of Reynir’s, his failure to feel the cold. That is not to say that he cannot feel the draft that came in underneath the bedroom door or the nip in the air when a frost is coming. Simply that the cold has never managed to enter his body. Perhaps it is a side-effect of keeping most of his magic tucked up inside of himself. Having nowhere to go, the magic could do nothing but churn about inside him, making little changes here and there. When Reynir hit puberty, still toiling under the dead name of Reynhildr, he made both the changes expected of male and female bodies. It was a kind of double puberty.   
Sure, he got his period, but his voice was always deep, and he had an Adam’s apple too. Then one day he woke up and tried to pee, and was bewildered to discover his genitalia had corrected itself overnight. 

Spending most of his teenage years in a slow-moving metamorphosis of his biological gender to match the actual was an experience that over-shadowed other strange things about his body. Like the fact that he never once shivered, never once complained of the cold in his bones or showed a single symptom of frost-bite though he liked to wander through new snow totally barefoot. So his parents left him to it. They did not explain a single thing to him and treated his transition as if changing one’s physical gender of one’s own accord was something plenty of people did- the village kids treated him like he was a weirdo because they were just jealous.  
Really it was not until Reynir popped out of the carrot-crate into the mission that Reynir realised he might be a bit more extraordinary than his parents let him believe. Briefly, he wonders how Tuuri will feel about him if she decides to get up before he has bathed and dressed. Thanks to the baggy clothes he favours, Reynir has not yet had occasion to show that he’s got a chest- like, actual breasts and everything. It’s not like the crew strip off in front of each other a lot. 

Reynir pushes the thought to the back of his mind. So long as nobody sees him naked or half-naked or in a tight-fitting shirt, then there’s no need to think too hard on these questions. 

 

The blood comes off quickly in flakes and thin streams of gunk that reddens the snow around him. Reynir washes himself with two bowls of water before he is satisfied that he is clean. Nanna-E fetches him a fresh pair of trousers from the Tank. Tuuri must still be asleep, or she definitely would have started screaming at some breeches dragging themselves out the door. 

Pulling a comb out of the pocket, Reynir wets the it in the dregs of the bowl and pulls it through his hair. The work is laborious. He has entirely too much hair- definitely civvie hair. Who in the army has the time to brush out this much hair, let alone wants to fight notoriously grabby monsters with it flowing free?   
Secretly, Reynir is grateful for another task. Anything to keep his mind off Mikkel- why Mikkel hasn’t yet come back, if Mikkel ever intends to come back, and what might happen if it is just him and Tuuri from here on out. 

Just as he has dragged the comb through the last of the tangles, Reynir hears his name.

“Reynir!” comes the same deep voice. Unmistakably Mikkel.

He jumps to his feet “I’m here! By the fires!”

Nanna-E is barely interested. She is not particularly fond of Mikkel- nor anyone else on the Tank. Her head lays heavy on her paws, her eyes open to tired slits.

“Mikkel, what took you so long?” Reynir cups a hand over his eyes to block the fire-light, but cannot see anything in the woods save for the faint glow the ghosts throw off. Mikkel can’t be walking through the woods in the dark.  
Literally. If he tried to pierce those woods in the dark he’d be attacked in seconds. And anyway, it’s too dark to get where he is going without light. In all the months Reynir has known him, Mikkel has never once tried to brave the night without some kind of source of light. He told Reynir the last time he did that, he was a fool of a sixteen-year-old trying to sneak off to meet a paramour on the edge of his family’s farm, and stepped on the tail of a wild dog napping across the path. A mistake he is not keen to repeat, of course.

Reynir’s arms fall to his side “Mikkel?”

“Reynir.” comes the call again, a little closer “Reynir, come here! Don’t make me wait.”

Nanna-E lifts her head “He sound wrong.”

Glancing at his fylgja, Reynir takes a step backwards towards the Tank.

“Reynir.” 

What makes the gorge rise in Reynir’s throat is the sound of his name. The same sound. Mikkel’s voice captured and played on repeat. He is not urgent, impatient or scared, all of which he should be. He might be summoning Reynir to help with the laundry.

“Don’t make me wait.” comes again.

“For what?” Reynir croaks. He clears his throat and calls out “Wait for what? You come here. Come to the fire.”

“Come here.”

“Not him.” Nanna-E growls.

“I know.”

“Reynir! Don’t make me wait!”

The voice seems to have learned emphasis all of a sudden. It’s Mikkel’s shout, almost, in the bass thunder, but it has missed out the note of humour. Mikkel never raises his voice in anger. He only ever raises it when trying not to laugh.

“Come into the light.” says Reynir.

A long moment of silence passes by. When last it spoke, the owner of the voice could have been mere metres from the tree-line.   
Now it could be anywhere. Reynir wonders if he is even going to be able to see it at all. 

Slowly, he stoops and picks up a stick from the pile of firewood he gathered earlier. He dips it into the flames and thrusts the resulting torch high into the air, then makes for the tree-line. Each step is long and deliberate. The ghosts shy back as the edge of the puddle of torchlight reaches the trunks. One hisses, drawing its ragged skin about its face.

“Come into the light.” he says again.

In the depths of the unpenetrated gloom, something stirs.

“Reynir! Are you starting a forest fire?”

He turns back to the Tank. Mikkel stands over the fire with the bloody scissors in his hands and a quizzical look on his tired, drawn face. Nanna-E sits at his feet and wags her tail with an uncharacteristic joy.

“What the Hel have you been doing here? Did you slaughter rabbits with Lalli’s scissors?”

He looks back into the gloom. Whatever was there before is gone now.

“Did you call out to me, just now?”

“No I didn’t. I’m not about to bring a bunch of trolls down on our heads. Alright, I’m afraid the news isn’t good. I combed those woods as best I could and there’s no sign of the others in our immediate vicinity- why are you still standing there like a fool for? Come over here, let me look at you. Then I left the woods and swung around to explore the town directly behind us and there are definitely signs of a struggle. A pile of troll-corpses, a few small fires still going, that sense of disinterested disapproval that lingers in the air after Lalli- that sort of thing. And one giant was still moving. Not very well, I might add. I believe Mighty Leader gave as good as she got. My god, Reynir, you’re as pale as a sheet. And your hair is wet. Get inside before you die of the cold.”

He bundles Reynir inside and tosses several blankets over his head before he will continue. The scissors go into a pocket which is quickly soaked through, but Mikkel takes no notice as he begins to pull off his outer-most layers and deposit them in the disinfector.   
“We have scenarios here. None of them are particularly good. Firstly, the other three were taken by surprise and are dead. But that would require some kind of remains. I don’t know how much you know about trolls, but they don’t eat what they kill if it’s immune- the person, that is. They just kill and forget about it the moment they’ve killed it. I didn’t see a thing to indicate one of them was dead- and they would have had to be strewn out there with the dead trolls-”

“Unless somebody took the body away for a burial.” mumbles Reynir. 

Mikkel’s brow knits “Yes, that is a possibility. There was fresh blood. Living blood, I mean, not the jellied stuff that falls out of those walking corpses. At least one of them is badly injured. Or two are moderately injured. Had Emil or Sigrun collected this hypothetical body we would probably be able to see some kind of funeral pyre. They’re both bound by that charming Viking convention of lighting your dead on fire if there’s no time for a barrow. And if Lalli has this hypothetical body then I can only guess at what he might have done with it. As far as I know Finns stash their dead up trees like big cats. At any rate, we need to prepare ourselves for some severe injury, if not death.”

“So…so you can’t figure out which way they went?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. My knowledge of tracking is limited, but serviceable. I couldn’t see a thing.”

“I want to look.”

“I figured you would say that.”

Now it is Reynir’s turn to scowl “Do you know how many times I’ve tracked down lost sheep? And the animals that hunted them, sometimes. Iceland has some pretty frightening predators, now, Mikkel, I’m talking Siberian tigers. The Conservation Effort really screwed our farmers over when it got bust open. If I can track down a Siberian tiger with a 100 kg ram in her mouth I can track down a couple of soldiers.”

“I don’t doubt you can. You seem to be forgetting you’re not immune, though.” 

“I have to do something.”

Mikkel does not reply. Instead he excuses himself to the washroom and emerges a moment later, changed and thoroughly disinfected, and goes to the bunkroom where Tuuri goes on sleeping through the exchange.  
He tests her forehead with the back of his hand while Reynir watches from the doorway, then measures her pulse. Peeling back an eyelid to look at the pallid, sleep-blind orb underneath, Mikkel clucks his tongue.

“She’s got something. I can’t say for sure if it’s the Rash or not.”

“All the more reason for me not to sit around on my hairy butt, right? Tomorrow we go back out. You and me. The Tank is locked up. Tuuri is safe. I go look for tracks and you look for the cure.”

“Put that idea out of your head right now Reynir. You’re no soldier.”

“Yeah,” Reynir tugs at a lock of his hair “But I’m no civvie either. You need my help. This is an emergency. Normal rules don’t apply.”

Mikkel tucks Tuuri’s blanket up to her chin. He stands over her as if contemplating his patient’s sweaty face. Reynir cannot begin to guess at what’s going on behind those unfathomable eyes. For the first time, it occurs to him that he might have been terribly afraid of Mikkel if they met under different circumstances.

“Reynir.”

“Yes?”

“Close the door. Go to sleep. We’ll speak about this in the morning.”


	9. The things that are done for love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: nonsexual abuse scars and strong suggestions of child abuse.

They were seven or eight. Must have been very close to eight or very soon after turning eight, because Hannu had his chipped tooth and Lalli distinctly remembers seeing the chip in Hannu’s smile on the day they turned six and that Hannu’s face was still a little bruised from the fall that had taken the chunk out of it. Their father was somewhere close by. He always is in Lalli’s memories. Drifting in and out of the background like a leaf stuck in an eddy, lingering here or there, but never long enough for Lalli to get a good look at him. Never long enough to see his face.   
Their mother, on the other hand, her face burns in his mind like a brand. She is there. Every last freckle of her. Every sinew in the arms that picked him up and deposited him on the dock, where she delivered this piece of advice he strains to recall now.

Hannu is beside him. As always. Hannu is an elbow unpleasantly sharp in his side and the breath whistling past his chipped tooth.

“Gods forbid, boys, gods forbid you ever need to remember what I’m telling you now.” her lips were chapped from the cold winds coming off the lake. Her short hair was tugged back into a sprig of a ponytail.

“Tuonela is not the only underworld, as we know. It is where our people are processed. Most of us will go there to sleep. Our Muslim friends sleep beside us in the ice to await their judgement day, while we might go on and on as long as we please. Some of us don’t, though. Some of us prefer to go to the other underworld if we qualify for it.”

The smell of the lake. The smell of his mother. How close was the disaster? Was it a week, a month away? Was it that very same afternoon?

“That is Walhalla. The gods of the Norse and Icelanders live there. There are some Finnish too, now. The gods marry from each other’s’ houses sometimes. So maybe a few Finnish gods are there as spouses. Friends, too. Our gods do not hate each other. Our gods are united, like we are, in the common struggle against the sickness. So what is a bit of swapping the dead every now and then among friends?”

“Weird.” exclaimed Hannu.  
It makes Lalli’s chest hurt to listen to, even as an echo inside his own head. He is glad he cannot see much of Hannu here. Just some brown wisps of hair in the lake breeze. The elbow in Lalli’s side. The infuriating whistle of breath about that tooth puts tears in his eyes almost thirteen years later. 

“Walhalla has an opposite to it. It’s called Helheim, and that is where the people who have no place in death go. I mean they did nothing with their death. They didn’t lose their lives in a brave battle against sickness or trolls or anything of the sort. People who go here are sad. Sometimes they are evil, but there are not that many evil people in the world.”

“Why do we have to hear this? I’m bored. Lalli’s not even listening. Look, he’s rocking again.”

Lalli hears his own six-year-old voice say “I’m listening.” Even before his family was taken from him, Lalli spoke as if he hoped no one would hear him.

“Well I’m not. This is boring. I wanna go swimming.”

“Hannu, your butt stays where it is. Or I throw it into the water. Your choice.”

Maybe she threw him into the water. Maybe they fought and Hannu stormed off of his own accord. That would make sense. As a child he tended to block out conflict of any sort. Whenever angry voices were raised, he dropped his head and turned off his hearing and watched his hands move almost independently of himself until the noise was gone.  
Whatever happened, when the memory picks up again his mother speaks only to him.

“What you need to know, Lalli, is sometimes the soul goes to this place before it’s body is really dead. Remember the time Dad jumped out of the boat when he thought it was sinking? The boat wasn’t sinking. But he thought it was. The soul is Dad, and the body is the boat except maybe with a bit of real damage. Either way it’s the fear of being hurt inside the boat that drives the soul and Dad away, right?”

“Right.” he echoed, more because he appreciated the sound of the word than because he understood. But his mother was satisfied.

“When that happens, it’s called-”

 

“-Pearling.” Lalli finishes over a decade later “Emil’s a pearl. Maybe with a lustre.”

“The words come out but they make no sense.” says Näkki.

Lustre. You’re one. The animal part of the soul. When somebody pearls they can have a lustre come out. A metaphor, I think.

Näkki attempts a shrug with his lynx shoulders “I guess? Human language semantics make about as much sense to me as they do to you.”

Let’s call it a metaphor.

“Ok, we’ve identified the metaphor. Now what do we do about it?”

Go diving for pearls, I guess.

Näkki grimaces. His luminous eyes swivel about the room, avoiding the bed where Emil lies “And how do you intend to get to Helheim? That’s where his people go when they cark it. I mean, they used to go to Walhalla but that’s shut up now-”

Lalli cuts across: I know, Näkki. So we go to Helheim. 

“Are you listening to yourself right now? Going to Helheim isn’t a cake-walk. We might die. Scratch that- we will die. That’s where all the dead have gone since the Rash hit, Lalli, and no one who leaves Helheim leaves it alive-”

Hannu will be there.

Expressions are hard for Lalli. It is far easier to listen to the voice and pick up on the tiny cues in intonation and volume, so it has been a merry Hel trying to figure out what in the name of the gods these crazy people want him to do, the language barriers aside. Sigrun’s only volume is a loud, boisterous roar that sounds like she is constantly giving a speech to a massive hall of her fellow warriors and makes Lalli want to smack her upside the head. Mikkel always sounds smarmy, so Lalli never knows if Mikkel is genuinely asking after his health or subtly insulting his dead mother. Reynir is a chirpy happy bastard and has only just begun to encounter the darker side of the world, but his words are still so much birdsong in Lalli’s ears. One irritating song after the other. Emil is a little different simply for being the one Lalli listens to the most, who seems to understand that Lalli needs a bit of verbal direction to make sense of whatever’s happening on the face.   
The only face he has never had any trouble deciphering is Näkki’s. After all, it is his own face set into a lynx’s skull. The same eyes. The same grim cut of the mouth, more like an open wound. Lalli knows what he looks like when he has been hurt. The pain on Näkki’s face is simply his own. 

“Oh,” mutters Näkki “Ok. So this is what you’re doing. If he is there, I won’t look. I’m not going to look at our dead brother. You realise he’s going to be frozen at eight years old. Hel, he might still have the wounds that killed him.”

Nothing we haven’t seen before.

Näkki turns his face to the wall “Fuck you’re cold, Lalli-cat. I sometimes forget what a cold bastard you are.”

This is at the point the pastor decides to poke her head in. There is a touch more colour in her face than when she last appeared. She manages a small smile for her guests.

“Hello. I heard voices. I hoped your friend might be awake.” she glances anxiously up at Näkki, who has curled up in a far corner of the ceiling to sulk “But I suppose it was you and your, ah, cat.”

Lalli does not like the feeling of her eyes on him. It reminds him of the feeling of lukewarm slush coming in through the soles of old shoes, the sensation diffusing over his skin wherever her eyes roam. In the wardrobe, he found a pair of jeans and a simple black sweater. Most of what she had in there was functional and non-descript, except for a bright plasticky thing that looked like it was supposed to be a coat. Just the sound of its many meshed layers rustling inside the sleeves made Lalli cringe, so he put it at the back of the closet where he did not have to look at it.   
He has yet to change Emil into something new. Whatever the river did to him washed the blood and grime away completely, and for some reason left the faint scent of rosewater. For now he’s drawn the bedspread up to Emil’s chin and tucked his arms down at his side.

“What is this place?” asks Lalli.

“This? Oh. I’m…you know what, I think people slept here. Needy people. There used to be people everywhere. I mean, before the river came along. The first thing the river did was clear out all the people. I am quite thankful she did so, because they had grown quite unruly.”  
There is a fog in her eyes, not unlike the fog that entered the eyes of the new recruits in Keuruu upon coming back from their first foray into the Silent World. 

“And are we safe here?”

She blinks “From whom?”

Lalli crosses his arms and shrugs “Anything that may want to cause us harm.”

“I think so. The sickness doesn’t like to come over into the river’s little summer. It’s too strange and hot for most of them. Some of them, though…mainly the shades. The shadows of the shadows the people forgot to take with them when they left. Do you pray?”

The change of topics is so abrupt that Näkki is compelled from the ceiling to Lalli’s side “Why?”

“Oh, I just wondered. I’m going to pray soon. I thought you might like to join me.”

“I don’t know if we’re on the same page, theologically,” says Lalli stiffly. He has a vague idea of what her version of praying might entail- is this even a Christian church? He does not much enjoy the notion of kneeling, hands clasped, thinking as hard as he can at his creators. Will she want to put her hands on him, like in a prayer circle? The thought of having physical contact with this strange clammy woman churns in his stomach “This was not an easy day. I think I’d prefer to just sleep, now.”

Her face falls a bit, but the smile stays intact “I understand. I hope your friend is awake soon.”

Her pale face retreats into the gloom. The door wheezes shut.

Lalli does not move until he can no longer hear her moving through the church. There is now window in the room, so he can only guess at what she might be doing outside. Or what the river might be doing for that matter. 

“Are we going then? Because I am dead on my paws here.” Näkki pushes his muzzle into Lalli’s shoulder and huffs, the transgression forgiven.

I want to put Emil in something clean first.

“Be honest. You just want to look at him naked.”

Näkki, no.

“What? I’m not asking you to take advantage of him, I’m just addressing the elephant seal in the room. C’mon, I’m your deepest secrets wrapped into a shiny kitty. No need to lie to me. No way to lie to me, actually, so give it up.”

I’m just going to ignore you completely, how does that sound?

Näkki chatters and makes jibes at him as Lalli draws the blanket back. Gods- Emil is almost exactly the same size as Tuuri. Where she is soft and squishy, he is muscle. He has maybe five centimetres on her and some of that is just the volume of his hair. But the same size of clothing that fits Tuuri should fit him, so Lalli pulls a Tuuri-sized sweater out of the closet and finds a pair of trousers to go with it. As to the problem of underclothes, Lalli figures Emil won’t mind going commando through his near-death experience. Ghosts or half-ghosts don’t need boxers.

When he lifts the hem of Emil’s shirt, Näkki falls silent.

His breath catches in his chest. With a tremor in his hands, he pulls the shirt up to Emil’s collar. There is no trace of the wound that almost killed him on Emil’s chest.   
Instead, dozens of scars. Small scars from tiny, brutal cruelties. Circular islands of burn tissue scattered across the tops of his shoulders where the cherry of a cigarette must have been stubbed. The shirt comes off. On his back, a range of scars drawn from the bottom of one shoulder blade to the top of its opposite. The corner of the buckle of a belt is imprinted again in burn tissue- perhaps warmed on a family hearth before it was applied to Emil’s back. By far the worst damage is concentrated around the small of his back, towards either of his hips. Here the skin has been bruised. The bones were sometimes broken, mostly battered about in their cradles of muscle. This is a place no one would think to check a child for an injury. Any discovered on accident could be brushed off as a souvenir from horseplay- barking their hip on the kitchen door as they ran out for a day of hard play.

His eyes burn. He tries not to look at the rest of Emil while he finishes dressing him, but what he has already seen will not peel itself from his eyelids. Gods, how it must have hurt. How he must have cried. The age of these scars- like some of his grandmother’s. The flesh was supple with early youth when they were inflicted so that the scars have grown taut and a little faded with the years. When this was done to him, Emil was young. 

As soon as the blanket is drawn up to his chin again, Lalli makes a dash for the bathroom and thanks his gods that this place has functional plumbing. His empty stomach finds something to deposit in the toilet bowl. While he heaves, there is a tug on the back of his neck, his hair lifting from his face into a hasty ponytail. Näkki’s teeth graze the back of his neck.  
It is a long time before Lalli feels strong enough to stand again. He leans against the cold porcelain of the sink and stares at his reddened eyes for a long time, Näkki’s muzzle light on his shoulder.

Lalli opens his mouth. He needs to hear his own voice “I burned him, Näkki.”

“Gods. That was different, Lallicat. That was just you- us- being pissy. He was alright. It didn’t hurt him.”

“Doesn’t change that I raised a hand against him and he was patient and forgiving- I’m never going to do that again.”

“Ok.”

This last foul surprise the day had in store for him has exhausted Lalli utterly. He gathers up the vestiges of the vestiges of his strength and cracks the mirror-front of a shallow cabinet open, grabbing the toothbrush and tube of paste in there. It is all he can do to finish his toilet and get himself under the bed before his eyes have closed of their own accord, his spirit takes leave of his body, and he finds himself stirring on the soft wood of his raft in the pond.

 

 

 

 

 

Once Reynir had appeared on the scene and had proved himself a fantastic hazard, the duty of keeping him from strolling off the face of the dreamworld fell to Onni. One night weeks before Onni knocked himself out by cramming Kokko into Emil’s flame-thrower, he made Lalli fetch and deliver Reynir to his haven. Though Lalli would have rather stuffed himself into Emil’s flame-thrower and been sprayed over trolls than listen to Onni posture and lecture, Onni made him sit down beside Reynir.

As usual, Reynir had no idea what they were talking about “That sea? Oh, I thought that might be symbolic of the water that’s between the continent and Iceland, you know? Because I sometimes have to cross the water to get to where you two are.”

“What? No. No, Reynir, this is an island.”

“The Finnish island?”

Lalli put his face in his hands and wished for a surprise attack. Anything. One of Reynir’s sheep, come to eat her shepherd’s freckled face in a fit of rabidity. The horse-ghost, tracking them into the havens for the same purpose. A rain of Ukko’s wrath in thunderbolts. Literally anything.

“Uh…ok, sort of. We have one half of the island. You have the other half. You’ve seen the border of the dreamworld, Reynir, it’s only a little ways away from Lalli’s swamp.”

“It’s not a swamp.”

“It is a swamp. I still love you even if you do sleep in a swamp, Lalli, now stop interrupting me.”

“It’s not a swamp, cliff-dweller.”

“It’s not a cliff! I’m an owl, not an eagle! This is an out-cropping of rock, a perfectly civilised-” he stopped in mid-sentence, looking beseechingly at Reynir “Do you see what I have to deal with? Anyway, there’s a border near Lalli. Finland finishes there. Then your hodgepodge of Scandinavian nations start. Those Vikings and elves and giants all live jumbled up together. If Denmark and Sweden had the faintest idea about magic I’m sure it would count for their dreamworlds too. I’ve never been over the border-”

“Onni’s a xenophobe.” Lalli muttered.

“I am a strategic coward, thank you. Lalli’s been over there because Lalli doesn’t care about what worrying for him does to my mental health.”

“It’s the same, with some giants. Not troll-giants. Giants with clubs.” which Reynir would know if he bothered to explore beyond his little pasture on the tip of the peninsula, the thin strait he strolled across to find them and the ribbon of land between Lalli’s pond and Onni’s cliff.

Reynir was, of course, delighted by the conflict, and by the fact that Lalli was taking part in a conversation. He could not stop smiling as he rapped the stone with his knuckles “So this is Finland. And I just came from the Scandinavian hodgepodge?”

“Yes. The water you walked over is just the watery bit between Finland and that peninsula you live on. One time I had to chase Lalli down to it and stop him from swimming across it.”

“I was being attacked by a swarm of bees. Ghost bees.”

“Even so, Lalli! When you hit the water you just stay under! You don’t start swimming across the damn strait!”

“Wait, wait,” Reynir glanced out to the coastline, where the sliver of his peninsula was visible across a decent stretch of calm black water “If I didn’t walk across the ocean…and I can clearly see I didn’t, then what’s out there?”

Onni shrugged “Egypt, probably. Other nations that have magic and their own mages.”

“How come we haven’t met with other mages then? Is everyone here a mage for the Finnish and Scandinavian gods?”

“Yes. All of us. You’ll meet some more of them, probably. It’s hard to meet people here whom you don’t already know. This is a big island. After this insanity is over, perhaps I’ll introduce you to a few of mine and Lalli’s colleagues from Keuruu. I’m sure they’d be charmed by you, Reynir. You’re surprisingly optimistic in spite of the overwhelming odds of the Rash and its various demons winning this battle.”

At last, Reynir’s smile crumpled a bit “Onni, is there somebody you can talk to? Do you have therapists in Finland?”

“Explain the demons.” urged Lalli “Or he’ll just walk out into the ocean and try to make friends with them.”

Onni flicked a nervous glance to the water “They’re ghosts. The ghosts of ghosts. I don’t know what they are, but…they’re very grabby. Did you ever notice how cold that water is?”

Reynir shrugs “Kinda? I just walked over it. I didn’t really feel it- my boots are very thick.” He hoiked a boot up and dropped it on Onni’s knee to demonstrate.

Onni flicked the boot off his knee with a disgruntled snort “Well, it’s cold. It’s very cold. That’s because Tuonela is under that strait. Incidentally: the reason I didn’t want Lalli to go swimming in it. And Reynir, maybe you should take the path over land. Scandinavians don’t interest them as much as Finns, but you never know.”

Now it was Reynir’s turn to shrink back into the cliff-face “Um…why didn’t you tell me that before? I go over that thing a lot. Is it safe?”

“Not for us, I told you. We’re Finns. Tuonela is where our gods send us when we cark it. So long as you haven’t got Lalli stuffed in your hood, I don’t think there’s much danger for you.” 

“But there is danger for you.” surmised Reynir.

A small smile crossed Onni’s ashen face “Of course. We’re Hotakainens, there is always danger for us.”

And he did not explain that remark, no matter how Reynir questioned him.

 

Lalli half-expects a face-full of red braid when he sits up. He sits up unimpeded and lets loose a ragged sigh. Näkki paces on the bank, corporeal again. 

“We can’t tell Onni, of course.”

“No.” Lalli swings his legs over the side and splashes into the water.

“Because he’d try to stop us.”

“Yes.” he climbs onto the bank and flicks a frond of pondweed from his thigh.

“And when he realises he can’t stop us, he’ll try to come to Helheim with us. The fear of it alone will kill him.”

“Probably.” Lalli sets off at brisk pace for the water. It’s a deep, black, ugly thing. Like the shadow of the pale sky.

“Who knows what will happen to him if he sees Ville and Hannu.” Näkki falls in step beside Lalli “And what about us? Are we just gonna get Em and go? I don’t feel good about this. We need to try. We need to at least- for Ukko’s sake, he’s our brother! Our twin! I still cry when I think about him- you do, I mean. How many times have we woken up from that same stupid dream, the one where he’s – the door goes and we think it’s Tuuri because she never remembers her keys. Then there’s Hannu on the doorstep, and so much blood. We need to see him.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think it’s going to make it better? If we see Hannu, will it be like Mikkeli never burned?”

“No, but-”

“Do you think we’ll get closure from seeing our dead twin about eleven years younger than us?”

“I don’t know-”

“Then shut the fuck up.”

 

Onni’s haven is empty. It is on the way, just a bit off the path they take to the ocean. Lalli spares it only a passing glance. There is no trace of his cousin’s sleeping body or his luonto, Hetewane.  
Once he has confirmed there is no one to stop him, Lalli does not look back again.

 

At the edge of the deep water Näkki gets one more jab out “I love him too.”

“Whom?”

“Both of them.” he melts into Lalli’s ribs snout-first and becomes as a warm fog about his heart and lungs.

Lalli dives in before he has time to think about what he is doing. With the powerful stroke of someone who grew up on the lakes, he swims out into the strait. His pace is slow and deliberate so as to give the things stirring beneath him a chance to look. To realise he is Finnish. Terror becomes a bitter taste that hides itself under his tongue. Were it not for Näkki’s stubborn fire he would have frozen within the first few metres.

It is just when he feels the first rank, slimy thing brush across the back of his thigh that he sees Reynir on the shoreline. 

He starts forwards, some greeting on his lips.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

Reynir could not have stopped more abruptly if Lalli had shot him. His mouth falls open. For the four months they have been trapped together in these tiny mental and physical dimensions, never once has Reynir heard Lalli raise his voice. 

“What- what are you doing?” blurts Reynir, his eyes wide “Lalli they’ll get you-”

“I know. I need to go to Tuonela.”

“But Tuuri-”

Something rank and slimy brushes past Lalli’s ankle “BE STILL!”

He stops again, his hands clasped to his chest as if to staunch a flow of blood “Tuuri needs you! I need you- it’s back! That thing that sang to us, the horse, it’s back and it knows our names.”

A dark shape bumps by his hip and knocks him to the side. Testing his strength. Reynir flinches. This time, he stops himself from running to Lalli’s aid.

“Please,” his eyes are wet “I don’t know what you’re doing but you can’t do it. We’re going to die in the Tank. It’s going to kill us. I can’t protect them alone.”

“You can. You will. I have to go.” a mighty jaw takes a firm grip on his ankle and Lalli has just enough time to get out “I should have been kinder to-” before he is dragged irresistibly into the depths of the dark water. Thick coils wind about his torso and legs. The vestigial limbs of some older, fouler form these beasts cast aside grip at his mouth, forcing it open so that the water can flow freely into him. Even as the water fills his ears, Reynir’s screams reach him.


	10. Waiting room of the dead- and not in the sense of limbo, but a literal waiting room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some Beetlejuice-like bureaucracy in the underworld for Emil.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today I'm crossing international lines in fuzzy crocs. My sense of shame could not be more acute.

The silence would be unnerving after spending so much time cramped in the Tank with the other five. Even on recon missions Sigrun has Emil in one ear and sometimes Mikkel in the other, with Lalli trailing in his quiet manner that still exerts as much of a presence as if he were babbling away like Emil does. But the gods did not see fit to give her silence; one of them, in their infinite and possibly sadistic wisdom, decided ghosts should be given psychic vocal chords with which to torment those who can see them.  
To drown out the incessant muttering and wheezing in her head, Sigrun speaks with her fylgja.

She collects some interesting information. Marit became aware of herself at the same time Sigrun was born. She led a misty existence until the age of about three, when Sigrun started to take a more serious interest in the world around her. Once Sigrun began to learn so did her fylgja. It was a tiny life she lived, confined to Sigrun’s immediate vicinity or left to wander about listlessly what she calls a ‘haven’ that Sigrun never used. Apparently, in some plane where gods and mortals could walk in stride if they chose to, Sigrun’s got another version of herself snoring away at the base of a magnificent oak tree. This Sigrun has never moved save for the tossings and turnings which are expected of troubled sleepers. It has been Marit’s lot in life to sit with this Sigrun, sniff at this Sigrun, sit on the chest of this Sigrun and think her thoughts until something happens in the waking world to cause Sigrun to jolt and knock Marit off her perch.   
The moment Sigrun fall asleep in this- the only physical world she has ever known- she will activate a body that has awaited her for thirty years.

Sigrun is not sure whether she is looking forward to that.

On the bright side, she has just discovered she can summon lightning. Needless to say, this is the second greatest personal revelation she has ever had, right after the time she discovered she could make her ears wiggle if she concentrated in front of a reflective surface. It trumps even her recent experience with the god she has admired most since her girlhood. 

Back before puberty hit and filled her with a hormonal rage that was to mature into an adult’s constant under-current of dissatisfaction with life and general existential distress, gentle Freyjr was her favourite. Dude had a sword that drove itself. How much more awesome can you get?  
But then she re-discovered Thor. Here was a man like her- more brawn than brain, but he made it work somehow. Sigrun knew that struggle well. Maybe she could bench-press her father from age eight, but what did that matter when her contemporaries were cunning and clever, and could think and talk circles around her on their worst days? Conversation and communication did not come naturally to her. Neither did it come naturally to Thor.  
Sigrun herself was wild and wily. Where others were wickedly smart, she had a kind of primal slyness that told her when to keep her mouth shut and when to let it hang open. Maybe she could not plan fifteen moves ahead of the game like some others could, but if Thor made it work by planning only five steps ahead, so could she. So the gently Freyjr was banished to the back of her mind, only to be remembered with a miasma of guilt and nostalgia at his festivals.

Now that she has actually met him Sigrun is no longer so sure she should love Thor as she does. On the other hand, however, lightning.

“Back, hellions!” Sigrun cackles at the top of her voice, which can be heard clearly even over the furious crackle of the lightning that’s streaming out of her palms “I’ll fry you all! Spirit barbeque! Hey- you in the back! Don’t think you’re getting away!”

The frantic flurry of ghosts part in a shower of ashy flakes wherever her lightning finds them. Each one bursts quickly, lighting up from the inside like a candle stood in front of a dark broken window, then flying apart all at once. Just as quickly they are reformed and gathering behind her, refusing to chance getting close again. They thicken about her every step she takes. Those she scared off earlier return and come closer and closer as if the dry murmurs of their companions are egging them on. Some bring new friends with them. The late-comers are taller and darker, which probably means they are spirits of the longer-dead.

Sigrun shuts off the lightning by squeezing her palm closed. Her path is clear. Also, swimming before her eyes. She puts her hands on her knees and grunts in exhaustion, hoping she is not about to vomit.

“Ok, what am I doing wrong?” she looks up at the incandescent sable floating over her head “They go boom, but they come back together.”

“Boom isn’t a verb.”

“It is now.” she straightens and gestures at the whispering host behind them “How do I get them to go boom and stay boomed?”

“As near as I can tell, you’re just doing what the floodlights around the Tank did. Scaring them off.”

Sigrun stares at her palms. Each one is reddened and a little warm to the touch, but they do not hurt. From underneath her fingernails glows the same light she bled just before Thor came to her. A glance down the bearskin and shirt shows her the same light seeps through her chest and prints the sallow shape of her ribs on her skin. It is disturbing to see a projection of her own skeleton. Not the most disturbing thing to happen today, however.

“What?” says Marit harshly “You think Thor granted you bigger tits along with those shiny new powers?”

Sigrun drops her cloak “Anybody ever tell you you’re a royal bitch, Marit?”

“I’ve only ever spoken to you. And to the god just now, and Näkki.”

“You’re a royal bitch.” Sigrun glances over her shoulder and makes a rude gesture at the ghosts, then sets off on her way. Marit picked the direction. She claims she can smell summer somewhere nearby, and that they should make for the spire of a church Sigrun will be able to see by the time the dawn comes in proper. For now, Sigrun is guided only by her new fylgja’s vague sense of where the next closest mage’s spirit is and the blue light issuing from her own body. 

 

Being dead is hard work. Undead, in Emil’s case, but it is demanding and confusing work all the same. Though Emil’s religious beliefs began and ended at a cautious hope there might be something beyond the pale of this world, he at least had an idea that if there was an afterlife, it would be designed for a smooth and organised transition. An instruction manual provided to every freshly deceased soul. A soothing hug from whatever god or gods might exist. The newly dead soul is pointed in the right direction with some words of encouragement.  
Emil ponders how naïve he must have been when he conceived this idea by a gutter while Ansgara attends to her parched throat with the stuff running in it. Carrying Emil down that giant cliff was no small task. For Ansgara anyway- Emil has gotten through it unscathed. In fact he has yet to experience a single pang of hunger or thirst since waking up in this very probably god-forsaken place. He has not yet decided if this should disconcert him or if he should just be relieved he doesn’t have to source food and water in this weird place. 

Ansgara straightens up, a beard of water droplets on her chin “I think I just drank Tuonela.”

“Tuonela? That place Tuuri’s always swearing on?”

“Yes. Bunch of dead Finns in ice, sleeping off their lives.”

Emil makes a face “Well don’t drink its melt! That’s terrible!”

“Oh please. It’s perfectly natural.”

He thinks back to the icy water running under that bridge, and shudders “Fine, but if you get a piece of dead Finn stuck in your throat don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

After some quiet debate, Ansgara and Emil strike off in a random direction. This direction seems a little more promising than the others in the maze spanning around them if only because the people coming and going from that way are a tad fresher than the rest. Every face Emil meets still holds a smile for him. It is like no city he has ever been in before- apart from the obvious difference of everyone being dead or dying like him. How strange it is to walk among people who look happy to see him, to see each other, who smile unreservedly at strangers. The only reason he can think these people are so happy is the worst of life’s suffering is behind them all. Sure, maybe they ended up in Helheim instead of the Walhalla some of them must have been expecting, but what’s the real issue with a different afterlife than the one you were taught to expect when there aren’t anymore trolls?

Emil is about to round another corner, stepping deliberately over the sloshing gutters, when Ansgara drives her snout into his arm and nearly knocks him face-first into the dead-Finn melt. He seizes her horn and just barely saves himself.

“Ansgara!”

“That building looks promising.”

“What?” he regains his balance with some ungraceful wind-milling “What building?”

“The one that says ‘Re-settlement services for the freshly dead’. That’s almost us. If we can at least figure out what in the Hel is going on in…Hel.”

The building Ansgara has picked out would, of course, have to be the most menacing of the lot on offer. It is somewhere between a faceless office building like the ones that litter Mora and one of the burned-out, cracked open long-abandoned houses that litter the Silent World. While the insides have not yet been exposed to the elements by a collapse, the whole thing looks like it will tumble down the moment someone inside sneezes a little too enthusiastically. Before this mission, Emil suspects he would have had a sit down on the ground and cried as quietly as he could rather than take his chances in there.  
But after surviving what he has so far survived Emil is determined not to be deprived of his chance at life just because the place in front of him looks like it might eat him.

He pushes against a splintering door. A little chime goes off over his head and makes him jump so hard he smacks his head on Ansgara’s chin. Witnessing this is a short and pleasingly round receptionist of indeterminate gender, tucked behind a neat slab of stone that could have been a grave marker once. They sit in the centre of a thinly populated waiting room. At the sound of the bell, everyone looked up, so everyone, save perhaps the woman with dark holes where her eyes should be, saw Emil make a fool of himself. A silver badger whispers into the ear of its companion and they break into badly-stifled giggles.

“Good morning.” says the receptionist.

Emil finds a smile “Good morning.”

“How did it happen, dear?”

“Death? Oh, uh,” Emil glances about the room, then leans in “Here’s the thing. I’m not really dead.”

The receptionist’s pleasingly round face goes through a series of expressions. Shock followed by pity followed by that sterile professional face a doctor will put on for examinations of a more intimate nature.  
“Ah, a pearl. And that behind you must be your lustre.”

He still has no idea what that means “Yes?”

“And what are your names?”

“I’m Emil. She’s Ansgara.”

The receptionist makes a note in a doggy-eared notebook “Alright then. Take a seat, and I’ll have someone out to meet you shortly. You have my condolences.”

“For what?”

“For your death. Terrible thing to happen to one so young. Poor thing. I hope you find the peace here that life couldn’t give you.”

“Thank you.” Ansgara sinks her teeth into Emil’s collar and tugs him backwards over to a free-chair before he can protest.  
Somehow, the waiting room of the dead has those same squinchy, uncomfortable chairs designed to torment their occupant that the doctor’s office has too. Emil is beginning to wonder if these people might skip over introducing him to the afterlife entirely and just give him an unexpected rectal exam, which is what happened the last time he went to the doctor.

An hour crawls by. Emil passes the time by listening to the conversations around him, and doing his best not to give a single coherent thought to how Sigrun is at the moment. Let alone Tuuri. 

“…flooded since Tuonela melted, but can you imagine moving five generations of family…”

Most of the people that go in and out, and the odd animal, are somewhere in the middle stages of death. Grey and ragged-looking, but not actually ragged. Some of them are so incredibly dead Emil marvels they can still compel their age-ravaged bodies to speak and move, though they all do so with great gusto and cheerfulness for people who are condemned to slowly fall apart throughout their afterlives. Must be something in the water. 

“…Valkyries are no more than brainless pigeons these days. No request of the Lord’s is too severe…”

“…never thought I’d miss my uncle’s rice porridge.”

“…heard a rumour Ensi was finally dead, but Hannu just laughed at me…”

Eventually, the hard seat grows unbearable beneath him. He joins Ansgara on the floor and collapses over her back so that his stomach is pushed up at the ceiling. He tries to remember where the wound that sent him here is on his body. Is it the stomach? The chest? Closer to the chest, he thinks. He was definitely having trouble breathing. And his chest was so cold. Like someone tried to glue him shut with ice. 

“…ripped to pieces above the city…”

“…admit I was killed by my own binder and, wouldn’t you know it, so was he!”

“…a mead last night and I saw your mother had just arrived…”

The voices around him drift in and out. To his surprise and slight disappointment, no one addresses him or even mentions him as they pass by. Apparently the sight of a semi-dead Swede having a stretch over a golden stag is nothing unusual down here. 

“…reckons he made out with a Valkyrie. Bullcrap, I say, they haven’t got brains…”

“…swan shit all over the backyard…”

“…swears he was killed by a Giant, but between me and you, I think it was tetanus.”

“…disgusting punishment, and the kids saw it! And what’s more the damn Swan shat on the roof afterwards…”

“Emil?”

Emil snaps to attention so abruptly he gives himself whiplash. The receptionist gestures down a hallway Emil didn’t see before “Go to the second door on the left, please. One of our people will be with you shortly.”

“You said that an hour ago.” he mumbles under his breath. 

As he passes the other doors, he hears a variety of noises. Someone weeping. Someone screaming. The tail-end of an extremely dirty joke that produces gales of laughter. He opens the second door on the left and finds a small room, a desk with the same sort of chair on either side, and a fogged window in the far wall. Ansgara has to double-up to get her horns through the door.

“This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to us.” she announces once settled, just in case he hadn’t noticed. 

The woman who eventually comes into the room gives Emil the shock of his life. His hair stands on end. He grips the arms of his chair and scoots back, bumping Ansgara’s torso. His breath catches in his throat. Luckily for him the woman’s attention is elsewhere as she lopes to the desk. Ansgara quickly noses Emil back into place and licks his forehead in a way that is either meant to be comforting or to confirm that she is just as surprised as he is. It’s Sigrun’s face, as she will be when she is older and greyer and has experienced more of life’s bitterness than she ever expected to withstand. The structure is more severe. Where Sigrun has full cheeks that make her eyes crinkle when she smiles, this woman has a sharp face that looks best-suited to the tired scowl she now wears.   
Taking her seat, the woman straightens her back and gives Emil a quick up-and-down. She has a grey wolf trailing her, which settles between her feet, the massive head resting on its paws and looking for all the world like all the sleepy dogs Emil has ever known. 

“Look like someone you know?”

“Uh.” says Emil.

She cocks an eyebrow. She could not be less impressed if Emil had vomited on her neatly clasped hands “It happens a lot. Get used to it.”

“Do- do you have a granddaughter? Named Sigrun?”

“I may. I wouldn’t know. I died when my son was fifteen years old. Whatever he did with his life after that is his business.”

The name of Sigrun’s father bobs up from the depths of his memory “Asbjörn Eide?”

“Yes. That’s him. What of it? Do you know him?”

Emil shifts in his seat “Sort of. I know his daughter- your granddaughter Sigrun. Um, she’s…she’s a Captain in the Norwegian army. My Captain at the moment. And my mentor, I guess. We’re in the middle of the Silence on a mission. She’s probably the reason I’ve made it as far as I have.”

“Interesting. My name is Frida, anyway.” she seems to consider shaking his hand, but decides against it. Instead she cracks her ancient knuckles and nods to the wolf at her feet “That old bitch down there is Garm. I heard you were called Emil and Ansgara. Which one is which?”

“I’m Ansgara.” offers Ansgara “Did they tell you we aren’t dead?”

A gruff voice issues from Frida’s shoes “Will be soon enough. Don’t make a difference.”

Frida ignores Garm “Yes, they mentioned you were pearling. I’m afraid there’s not much to do about that. It’s going to be disorientating for your first few days until the physical body left up in the living world expires, but we can put you somewhere to weather that-”

“Wait, wait, wait. No, we’re not here to die.” Emil glances up at Ansgara “We- we need to go, uh, back. To the living world.”

Frida sets her jaw. She contemplates him in an eerily Sigrun-ish way- in fact, it is the exact same way Sigrun tends to look at her dinner. Is it worth the trouble of eating this?

“That’s not possible. Lord Hel is quite specific in that respect.”

A shiver shoots up his spine at the mention of this name. It conjures a vague memory of a fire-side story, of a body half flesh and half bone. Whose voice is that in his head? Is it his grandfather’s? Is it Siv’s? Who told him this story to keep him from wandering into the darkness of the world?

“Lord Hel.” he repeats.

“Oh no, you’re a Swede, aren’t you? Asgard Almighty, are you people still denying your gods?”

Emil starts back at the unexpected venom in her voice “I’m not! I mean, I only just recently realised this whole Asgard and Ukko and all those things, that they had merit. I shot a gigantic fire bird out of my flame-thrower about two weeks ago. No need to convince me! I’m just- my lore, I’m a little lacking in my lore.”

Frida’s stern face relaxes somewhat “Good. At least I don’t have to start from the bottom up. You Swedes are terrible to comfort- second only to the Muslim folks. I cannot tell you how hard it is to explain to a freshly dead Muslim how Jahannam and Jannah fit into this. They expect some peace in death after all the trouble the world has suffered in the past ninety years, but then they arrive into this relative wasteland,” Frida gestures about the room, inviting him to look at the various states of decay all around them “With no sort of benevolent god in sight…well, it’s a stark contrast to what they were expecting. What we were all expecting, I suppose. Come here. To the window.”

Abruptly she stands and stalks across the room to the nearest window, her wolf padding after her reluctantly. Emil joins her and marvels that he has found cause to sympathise with a wolf. Frida puts her face centimetres from the fogged glass and squints up at the gloomy sky, Garm putting her paws up on the sill. Emil’s eyes wander aimlessly over the darkness and the arthritic skyline until a flash of silver catches his eyes. He follows it from the distance to near-distance until the figure becomes clear as an armour-clad woman on an equally armoured, winged horse, flying a figure-eight over the rooftops of Helheim.

“Ah.” is all Emil can get out.

Frida grunts “Tell me you at least know what to call her.”

“A Valkyrie?”

“Praise the gods, he knows something, Garm.”

Garm’s wet nose flattens on the glass “The legends are mostly right. Bunch of women on flying horses that scream a lot. There are a couple of men up there too, but I suppose it confused the ancients, since they all wear their hair long. Besides it’s hard to tell if there are boobs with all that armour. I know a couple that fly around bare-chested in the summer.”

“Um.” replies Emil.

“I was a mage. Not for any military- just a common offensive mage for my home-town, Dalsnes. When I first saw the Valkyries, Garm and I were dying the Viking way.” Frida folds her long arms. Her scowl deepens, so much so that it looks like the crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes will tear “Blood and glory. You must understand blood and glory. If you’ve got a mentor from the military, you are military, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Blood and glory then. Dying for the furtherment of humanity, the honour of the gods… I tell you I had never been so glad to see another person more in my life when the first Valkyrie came over me. It spurred me on, seeing her. There were about five of them above me by the time I was dead. Then the next thing I know, I’ve woken up on the slopes of the valley around this place. No feasting hall. No einherjar. The gods I met were not the gods I expected to meet.”

Three other Valkyrie appear in a tight formation. The one at the head has drawn their sword and waves it about, either giving directions or using it to illustrate a point. Emil watches them until they disappear into the gnarl of rooftops “Where are the gods?”

“They’re all locked in Asgard. The rainbow bridge went down in the first months of the Rash. Apparently, the Finns and Vanir had gathered up in Asgard to debate about what was to be done- even the senior spirits of the Saami were there. As far as we know, they made the choice to sequester themselves from the spiritual threat of the Rash. The ghosts it makes can even pull aapart a god, in great enough numbers. I suppose they still have some communication with their mages, but they’ve never appeared in the physical world since. A few of them didn’t go to Asgard. Lord Hel. Lord Mielekki, the Finn woman of the woods. Apart from her, the few that dwell with us are here in Helheim. There’s Lord Freyjr, the Swan of Tuonela and Lord Sima-Suu. She’s the-”

“Daughter of Tapio. She has a sima-pili, a little flute, that tells hunters where to go on hunts.”

Garm huffs against the glass, possibly laughing “He knows of the most obscure Finns, but not his own gods?”

Emil shrugs “Tuuri likes to tell stories. She’s the skald on the mission. My friend. Gods almighty,” he scrubs a hand across his eyes, just in case the stinging of his eyes has actually brought up anything “I can’t stay here. There’s a serum she needs. She’s got the Rash-”

With a scoff, Frida cuts him off and heads back to her desk. 

“She’s dead then.” adds Garm helpfully “And you’ll see her soon.”

It is all Emil can do not to kick his chair across the room. Sensing his distress, Ansgara puts her heavy muzzle on his shoulder. 

“No cure has ever worked.” says Frida simply.

“This one will.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because it can’t not work. I refuse to believe it won’t work to heal her. Otherwise, I’ve almost no reason to go back to the Tank- where the others are. If Tuuri has the Rash she’s bound to infect Reynir, no matter what measures we take to stop it. She’ll kill Reynir and probably Mikkel too. The last I know of Sigrun, she was leading a troll off mine and Lalli’s scent. She’ll come back to the Tank and find two trolls and a half-eaten Dane between them. That might just destroy the last of her will, I don’t know. It might. Tuuri dying will kill Lalli, because he can’t lose another member of his family. So best-case scenario, if Tuuri dies then the rest of my crew dies without exception. Two of them are stuck up in the living world as Rash-ghosts, and the other three are launched down here into this misery. So the four of us wait here for Ragnarok to stop dragging its heels. But I can’t believe that would be allowed to happen to Tuuri. If I chose to believe it won’t happen, then it’s true until I’m proved wrong. Until I can see for myself what’s going on up there, I’m going to choose to believe the serum will save Tuuri, that Sigrun will come back to the Tank alive and well, that we can inoculate Reynir against the Rash, that Mikkel is in one piece and Lalli is somewhere near me, physically, waiting for me to wake up.”

This time, his face is wet. While Frida leans back in her chair and digests his little speech, Emil scrubs his eyes dry on the back of his sleeve. Outside there is a faint series of cries. From the musical yet bone-chilling quality, Emil assumes they are the Valkyries’ cries. 

At length, Frida crosses her arms on the desk “Who are those people?”

“The crew on the mission I told you about.”

“And?”

“And…and my friends. My mentor, my friends and…and, well, someone who I would’ve told I loved them if I thought it was the right time. Or if we spoke the same language.”

Frida exchanges a weighted look with Garm “Tell me, Ansgara-”

“Emil.” 

“-Emil. Do you have any family here?”

A knot forms in his stomach “Grandparents. Apart from that, no one I’m eager to meet.”

“Well you had better set about finding them.”

“I can’t stay here to die.”

“You have to. There’s nothing else to do.”

“Wait, you said the reason I couldn’t go back is because Lord Hel said so- why don’t I just take it up with-”

Frida’s hand whips across the table and clutches him by the collar. She pulls him so close the cold mist rising off her ghostly flesh sets off a rash of goosebumps all over Emil.  
In a dry whisper, she says “Put that idea out of your head right now. Lord Hel does not tolerate talk like that.” she releases him, but a firm hand on his shoulder does not allow him to retreat “She’ll have you eaten by the Swan, at worst. At best the Valkyries will cast you out into the Tuonela melt and you’ll spend eternity floating like driftwood, or be eaten by a Stallo in a canoe.”

Emil thinks carefully, then asks “What’s a Stallo?”

“I think we’re done here.” Frida lets go of him at last.

He leaps to his feet and scoots towards the door, keeping a wary eye on Garm. He has one foot out the door when Frida calls after him.

“A Stallo is a kind of giant. They’re Hisii’s particular gift to our Saami friends. You’ll know one when you see one, because it will be wearing a robe made out of human skin and it will flay your ghost’s body before it eats you.”


End file.
